Her Boys
by Aisho9
Summary: Sam and Dean take on a case expecting it to be business as usual, but they come away with an unexpected consolation prize: Jordan Delaine. At first it's just a lark, but soon Jordan is more than just a tagalong friend: she's family.
1. Abandoning the Mall

This is definitely AU. I more or less decided I was done with the whole boys-only-club thing, and decided to add my own character to the mix xD It's pretty much in keeping with the main storyline, thus far, though I admittedly haven't finished it yet.

I wrote this from Jordan's point of view, but I want to emphasize that this is about the Winchester family, not necessarily Jordan herself. It's more about how Jordan comes to be a part of that family and what that says about the Winchesters. So sue me, I love the brothers. :) Enjoy!

* * *

Jordan stretched, giving a long sigh as her knotted and tired muscles pulled. A glance at her cell phone's glowing face told her that it was nearly eleven. She'd spent far too long doing inventory, but that lazy slouch Reilly hadn't organized it for her like he'd said—if anything, he'd made the mess worse. She'd spent half the time just trying to _find_ products, much less counting them.

Well, whatever. It was what it was. Deep within the bowels of the mall, where no one, not even security cameras, lurked, Jordan shucked off her employee uniform and climbed into the outfit she'd tucked into her cavernous purse that morning. It was her favorite, one she'd spent a lot of time and money putting together especially for her best friend Audrey's birthday tonight: a dark Ecote puff-sleeve leather jacket, a grey racerback T-shirt, a pair of her favorite Guess skinny jeans, and, her favorite part, the dark grey Aldo Norkus heels she'd bought just this week, like construction boots gone glam and sexy.

Oh yeah. She was going to be _hot_ tonight. She redid her ponytail real quick, to give it some life, but a ponytail was a ponytail. Whatever makeup had survived the day would have to suffice now, because she was already late and couldn't put off leaving any longer if she wanted to make the club on time.

Jordan Delaine, twenty-eight, eternal mall employee, was ready to take on the world.

She dutifully locked up the stock room and made her way down the long service corridors, back towards where humanity lived. Jordan liked to tell her friends that the mall they saw was basically just paint, a pretty shell over two floors of horror movie-style hallways, dark rooms, and bolted locks. The mall was creepily still, but after ten years of working in the mall, Jordan was used to it. Her heels clicked loudly against the faux stone floors.

For five to six days a week for the last ten years, give or take a few morning shifts, Jordan had left the mall for the night using a side door that was never locked from the inside, so that the security guards and cleaning staff could leave without hunting down a key. It was a door that couldn't be opened from the outside, so mall management didn't care, and hadn't ever cared—but tonight, when Jordan tried it, the door wouldn't even budge. It didn't rattle or anything, just … stayed. Like she'd suddenly lost the petty strength to wiggle a door.

"Okay," said Jordan, perplexed, and tried another exit. The doors were the same as the first: locked, of course, but strangely immovable, too. She tried the next exit, and the next, until she was running (in heels!) from exit to exit, banging on doors and wrenching the handles, but none of them, not one, budged.

"Shit, shit," she breathed, and pulled out her cell phone on her way down to the security office. She stopped. There wasn't any reception. She'd have expected that below-levels, where the storage rooms were, but out here, reception was always perfect. It had to be, or else the patrons would complain. She waved her cell phone around, moved several feet in either direction, but nothing helped. There wasn't even so much as a flicker of life. _Dead air_, she thought, and chill crept down her spine.

Jordan spent a split second staring at the dim-lit hallways of the empty mall, heart thudding so loudly she could hear it in her ears, and then took off at a trot for the security office. It was hidden down a service corridor, so that angry customers had to be truly persistent in order to lodge a complaint, and while that had never bothered her before, it did tonight. The cameras watched her come forward, but the little screen beside the door that usually reflected her image back to her in fuzzy black and white was dead.

Hands shaking just a little, Jordan reached out and tugged open the security office doors—and nearly lost her dinner. The stench that rolled out was awful, deathly awful, and when the lights flickered into life, she could see why. There were corpses everywhere, lolling in their chairs, collapsed onto the ground, and they were wearing uniforms and nametags—Luis, Clarence, McGrady, Brown. Night guards that Jordan had known for years, most of them, and struck up a friendship with.

"Oh God," she said, and then the lights died. The door she was holding onto jerked beneath her hand, as if someone had pulled on it, and the instant she stepped back it slammed in her face. The mall doors were pressurized not to slam—years ago she and Monique from the coffee shop had tried, repeatedly, until Gorman, the Head of Security back then, had told them to knock it off. These doors just didn't slam.

Apparently, now they did.

Jordan took the slamming door as a sign and beat a hasty retreat down the corridor, slowing down only once she reached the main stretch of mall. She looked around, trying to remember all the various nooks and crannies she might possibly get out through. All the main doors were blocked, obviously. Security wouldn't be able to help her now, and without cell phone service, she couldn't call for help either. The only option left was to break out.

Most of the glass was reinforced, the sort that they put in banks and gas stations, in case a mad gunman laid siege to the mall. She'd always thought it was overkill, but never more so than tonight. But if she remembered correctly, on the south side of the mall there was a corridor down to the trash compactors with a broken door. It wouldn't shut, and hadn't for months now. It was worth a shot.

She went that direction, her eyes and ears open. Someone had to have killed the security guards, and she sure as hell didn't want to run into them. But she saw nary a soul, and had almost convinced herself that she was alone, when somewhere, a door slammed.

Again with the impossible slamming. Doors here didn't _do_ that. But the sound echoed on, telling her that they did. Somehow. She felt another chill, this time all over, and the shadows around her seemed to flex and grow darker. Or maybe the lights were dying.

Moving slowly now, putting her feet down gently so that the heels didn't click, Jordan crept towards the south end. She kept her back to the wall and made sure to swivel her head around every so often, checking behind her and up on the second level, too. She paused beside Victoria's Secret, the world silent but for her breathing, and the lights flickered—all of them, this time, like someone had flipped a switch. But that was impossible, too. She knew for a fact that these were the emergency lights, lights that were always on no matter what, and couldn't be turned off. Even if the power grid failed, there were generators to keep them up.

And yet …

Something like a cold breeze flowed over her, sending fear driving deep into the pit of her stomach, and in her ear a voice wheezed, "_Lovely_…"

Jordan spun, heart racing, but there was no one there. She could feel someone standing beside her, _knew_ someone had spoken to her—but the air beside her was empty. Like the mall. Something grazed her hand as she watched, and with something like reflex Jordan wrenched her hand away and said furiously, "Get the hell away from me, perv!"

The chill sank away, and the lights stopped their mad candle-like flickering. Her momentary courage went, too, and she sank against the wall and focused just on breathing properly. Her pulse began to settle—and then two shadows appeared before her, sending her leaping away, only to crash into a faux marble pillar. (She'd been there when they'd installed it—it was reinforced concrete with a pretty shellacking job.)

"Whoa!" one of the shadows said, and she realized they were people. "Easy. We thought we heard something."

"Yeah, me, getting the bajesus scared out of me," Jordan snapped, drawing upright. If she wasn't so terrified, she'd probably have invited them to the club. They were exactly the sort of man candy Audrey would love for a birthday present. "Apparently the mall is haunted. Who knew?"

They raised their eyebrows simultaneously, and then looked at one another, like it'd been choreographed. The shorter one spoke. "What've you heard?"

"Heard? Nothing. But all the doors are blockaded, the security guards have been murdered, and I'm ninety percent sure I just got felt up by Casper." Jordan gave a little shiver, and it was then that it occurred to her that the only people who should be at the mall at this hour was security—security and whatever poor schmuck had been doing inventory until eleven, which if she had to guess, was uniquely her.

But there they were. And they were customers, she could tell, not mall staff. She raised her eyebrows, imitating them, and said, "Why are _you_ here?"

They shared another look, and had apparently decided on the truth, because the tall one said, "We're here to kill your ghost."

"Oh, great," said Jordan. She waited, but there was no "just kidding!" forthcoming. "No—really. Why are you here?"

"Maintenance?" the short one tried.

"Se habla Español?" Jordan shot back. "There's only one white guy on our maintenance crew and he's from Jersey."

"We're here to kill your ghost," the tall one repeated, and this time, Jordan believed them, mostly because there was something cold grazing her neck. She jerked and swung her purse, hitting the pillar—there was a little _crack_ that said she'd smashed her cell phone—but the cold left.

"Then kill it!" Jordan said furiously. "_You! _Dead guy! You touch me again and I'll feed you your own ectoplasm, you shit!"

Someone laughed, and it wasn't the two Ghostbusters. Jordan's face went white.

"Guess here is as good a place as any," the short one said, and dropped a pack Jordan hadn't noticed to the ground. They got busy pulling out candles and chalk and herbs, and began constructing what looked like a pagan ritual on the floor of her mall.

"You're nuts," she said mildly. "How can I help?"

"One candle at each corner," one of them said, and she obligingly began laying down candles every time they added a tip to the star, ending with a grand total of twelve. She took out her lighter, and when the tall one nodded to her, she began to light them.

"I'm Jordan," she said, while she worked.

"Sam," the tall one answered, and jerked his thumb at the guy beside him. "That's my brother Dean."

"Yo," said Dean, eyes flicking once to hers, a half-assed and probably unconscious flirt. She didn't mind. Not one iota. If they had been twins she would have taken video and sold it to Audrey as soft-core porn. Gorgeous didn't even begin to cover it.

Well. If she hadn't broken her cell phone, she would have taken video.

"So," said Jordan, crouched beside their complex artwork, "want to tell me why Casper has the mall on lockdown, how you knew about it, and what the hell you're drawing?"

"Casper," Dean answered, voice gruff but tone distant, "is one hell of a lecherous poltergeist, and one discovered feeding on souls can give it more power. Thus, the juice to—as you said—blockade an entire mall. We knew it'd be here because every surrounding building has reported activity, but in small doses, and what I'm drawing is a little something I like to call a spirit bomb."

"Because he can't pronounce the actual name," Sam put in, grinning, and Dean shoved him, but there was no malice in it.

"Cool," said Jordan. Dean looked at her. "Not the pronunciation, the spirit bomb. It's going to napalm this Amityville creep?"

"You're taking this very well," Sam told her, and Jordan gave a gentle shrug.

"I expect I'm in shock. I'll start screaming and flailing once it's over. Do you have to do a chant to turn it on?"

"Yep," said Dean, and that was when the windows blew.

Not the windows to the outside, but the glass to the storefronts, there to give the appearance of separation. Glass shot out into the air in a sparkling mist, raining down on them and leaving cuts on whatever skin they couldn't manage to hide.

"Shit," Dean muttered, shaking the glass off his jacket, and resumed sketching the spirit bomb. Sam had gotten to his feet and was busily laying down a line of salt around them in a circle. Jordan could guess what it was for, but she couldn't help but be a little bit skeptical at the idea of it working. Just as he finished the giant potted plants, set into stone cauldrons that rose chest-high, because to break off their bases and roll towards them, while something shrieked and made great booming noises upstairs.

"It's like a little kid having a tantrum," commented Jordan, both eyes on the line of stone rolling steadily towards them.

"Dean," said Sam.

Dean kept drawing. "I know."

"_Dean_."

"I _know_, give me a _break_." He put a last flourish and nodded. "Okay."

Sam yanked out a book and began to read. Every word he said, the shrieks grew worse, and the plant pots went faster. Jordan found herself reaching down her shirt front to grasp her mother's cross, and though she hadn't prayed in years, her lips moved hastily through the Lord's prayer.

And then it stopped.

"Sweet," said Dean, and stood up. He dusted the chalk off his hands. "Works every time."

"That's it?" Jordan asked, still crouched on the ground with her cross clasped between her hands. The brothers shrugged. "What a letdown! And I was hoping for some bloodshed."

Dean started to smile at her, but the lights were brightening, and with them came the sound of alarms, hundreds of them, one for every store with a window that had been blown out. One of the brothers—she wasn't sure who—swore, and Sam pulled her to her feet. "We've got to go," he said, seriously. "You _really_ don't want to get caught by the cops in this mess."

He was right. No one would believe that they'd been fighting a ghost. They took off at a run, and Jordan followed, making excellent time despite her heels. They went down the corridor on the south end, where the broken door was—that was how they'd gotten in, she realized. They'd had to have covered every inch of the mall just to find that one door. That spoke to a level of dedication that was, to say in the least, impressive.

In the trash bay was a sleek black Impala, the sort of American muscle that Jordan had always lusted after but could never afford. She drove a hand-me-down Honda with a touchy transmission.

"Get in," Dean told her, and Jordan came back with, "With _pleasure_."

The Impala's engine roared, giving Jordan the chills—the good kind, this time—and they zipped out onto the open road just in time to see black-and-whites cresting the far hill. Jordan let out a wild laugh. "That was _great_," she said, leaning forward between Sam and Dean. The grin on her face was so wide her cheeks hurt.

"You won't think so when they get a hold of the security footage," Dean replied. "It'll show you going into the security office. You'll be their prime suspect."

Jordan's smile vanished. "_What_?"

"Hey, you're the one who went in there, not me. I'll bet they have footage of you walking around the hallways, too, before everything went to hell. The morning news will be calling it terrorism."

"Oh, hell," said Jordan. She sat back with a thump. "I can't go home, can I?"

Sam looked at her sympathetically, the answer in his eyes. She drew in a deep breath, let it out, and then said, "Nothing I can do but enjoy the ride, I guess. Where are you headed?"

"Nowhere you want to be," said Dean.

"Yeah? Because if they have me on tape, they have you too, sunshine."

Dean and Sam looked at one another again. Jordan was beginning to understand that these were conversations, muted for her benefit, like a pair of foreigners who suddenly switch languages so the ignorant local can't understand them. "Great," said Dean. "Like we need the attention."

"We should lay low," Sam agreed.

"Exactly," Jordan said. "And so do I. Why not together?"

"Look, Jordan, I understand you've been through a traumatic experience—" Dean began.

"Traumatic? I'd call it fun, though I could have done without the corpses." Jordan patted his shoulder. "It's all right, I won't be much trouble. Unless you leave me somewhere on my lonesome, where I'm liable to get captured. I'll warn you, I have a big mouth."

"That's black mail," said Sam.

"Yeah, well, you weren't being neighborly."

"Deal," said Dean, and Jordan reflected that if she'd changed in her car like she'd planned, she'd be wearing a red and yellow uniform instead.

Small miracles, as her grandma used to say.

* * *

After a week or so on the road with the Winchester brothers, Jordan had discovered a few things.

One: Plaid was God.

Two: The trunk of the Impala was not used for luggage.

Three: They were still a pair of gorgeous human beings, but Dean ate like an animal and Sam never, _ever_ stopped complaining.

She was sitting on the edge of a motel bed, wearing a makeshift dress she'd made out of one of Sam's shirts and Dean's belts, the result of which was actually very pretty, though it gave the boys ideas. Dean was cleaning his gun collection, and Sam was doing something on the computer—either porn or research, and since he wasn't blushing or trying to hide the screen, she guessed research.

Jordan grinned at her joke. As if Sam would watch porn with a girl in the room. Now, Dean on the other hand—

Dean looked up, as if he knew that she was thinking about him, and said, "Bored?"

"Not yet." That, at least, was the truth. She had no cell phone, but Sam had let her use his computer, so that she could at least email her friends and family to tell them that no, she did not bomb the mall, yes, she was all right, but she wouldn't be coming home any time soon just in case. In the meantime her life consisted of burger runs, AC/DC, and crappy motels.

She was _loving_ it. Maybe not the crappy motel part—she still had little panic attacks every time she thought about what might live in those sheets—but the Impala, the shitty food, the poring over obituaries, and hell, even the music, it spoke to her. And when they stopped over in some podunk town fry up a gremlin (a gremlin!) they'd let her use a gun and a blowtorch, and she'd walked away from that with her blood singing and a grin on her face a mile wide.

"Really?" asked Sam, shooting her a little look. "Because we've been doing nothing but driving for the last three days."

That was a straight-up lie. They'd gotten into a bar fight on Tuesday, had worked on the Impala on Wednesday, and today Dean had decided to do some spring cleaning, which meant that Jordan got to sit back and watch a parade of deadly weaponry that would have made Victor Bout proud. Her favorite so far was a Browning 1911, chromed with ivory grips, and she'd almost asked if she could hold it, except that it was clearly Dean's favorite, too.

Instead she played with the machete, which hadn't been cleaned yet, and therefore still had a smattering of blood near the hilt. "You two wouldn't be boring even if you were pictures on a wall," Jordan said. Her smile turned wicked. "Audrey would call you _visual aides_."

"Oh, Christ," said Dean, and Sam squinted at her like he hoped she was kidding. Unfortunately, she wasn't.

"That gives me an idea, actually," Jordan said, setting down the machete. "My friends need better proof that I'm alive than an email. Emails can be faked, you know? Audrey's probably convinced herself by now that I've been kidnapped to Iraq. Can I have a card?"

That was how it worked now. She couldn't use her own plastic, because the police would trace that, and she didn't carry cash. Instead she came forward with her palms out for one of the many faked Winchester credit cards.

"For what?" Dean asked, a little suspicious.

"You'll see," Jordan said. "Now cough up, Daddy Warbucks."

Sam snorted, earning a glare from Dean, but Dean dug out his wallet anyway and handed her a card that said Charlie Daniels. She could rock it, so long as the cashier didn't like fiddles. "Thanks," said Jordan, and kissed him on the cheek, and flicked Sam's ear as she passed. They were awesome guys, really. They'd have gotten along well with her friends—because they were sexpots—but they'd have gotten along with her father, too, God rest his soul. He'd had the same penchant for guns, rock, and fast cars.

She walked down to the gas station at the end of the block, wearing her fabulous Norkus heels, which were now in tatters after the gremlin episode, and stained from the brandy and tequila that'd been flying through the air during the bar fight. She found she didn't care, and even like the roughness they'd taken on.

Maybe she should get a tat, too.

Chuckling to herself, she went inside, and picked a disposable camera off the shelf. "Just this for me, hot stuff," Jordan said to the cashier, who weighed about three hundred pounds and had a small ecosystem of acne on his chin.

* * *

A week or two later, Audrey found an envelope in her mailbox without a return address, and inside was a photo of Jordan with two shirtless men, both of whom were scowling at the camera, which, in Audrey's opinion, looked sexy as hell. Jordan was grinning and she had her arms around their waists like she'd known them forever.

On the back, Jordan had written her a note.

_Hey babe! Just wanted to let you know I wasn't kidnapped by Al Qaeda :) The hunks in the photo with me are Dean (grande) and Sam (venti), it's them I'm traveling with. I'll probably be gone a long time, especially since they put a warrant out for me. It wasn't our fault, I promise! I'm just glad we got out of that mall alive. lol Anyway, spread the word that I'm all right. And you have permission to tack this on your wall. I'm only sorry I couldn't blow it up for you! _

– _Jordan_

_P.S. You do __not__ want to know what I had to do to get them shirtless! On second thought, maybe you do … :)_

_

* * *

_

In actuality, Jordan hadn't had to do much at all, so long as you didn't count whining and begging and finally draping herself across Sam's lap. Once Sam had agreed to it, Dean was small potatoes—"Your brother is doing it. You scared, Winchester?"—and bam, Jordan had herself a sexy photoshoot. She recruited the cleaning lady as photographer, and Rosa had been reluctant right up until the moment she saw _what_ she was photographing, and then she had all the enthusiasm of a thirteen year old girl.

Thanks to Rosa, Jordan had a whole stack of photos of her and the boys, including one where they were both kissing her cheek, and that one she kept in her wallet. She taken the photos for Audrey, yeah, but the Winchesters had really grown on her, and if they parted ways tomorrow (God forbid!) she wanted something to remember them by.

Shortly after Jordan's impromptu photoshoot, which she was positive both boys had enjoyed despite their complaints (there was a photo in her stack of the boys tickling the living daylights out of her, and that had been entirely their idea) they left for the last leg of their journey. Their destination, if Jordan understood it correctly, was Bobby's, but who Bobby was, she didn't quite know.

They arrived midafternoon at a gearhead's wet dream—an endless sea of metal, an eclectic mix of old and new that only junkyards had, with a special emphasis on American muscle cars. Jordan's grin turned to a gasp as the Impala rolled to a stop.

"No way!" Jordan cried, and squished Sam's seat forward so that she could wiggle free of the Impala's depths. She nearly turned an ankle trying to jump out in heels, but she recovered well and ran the rest of the way to the beaten hull of what was unmistakably a 1965 GTO. "Oh, my _love_," Jordan said mournfully. "You're beat to hell. Look at you. You need a face lift."

"Just got that one last week," a voice said, and Jordan spun. An old man in a baseball cap was looking at her from the shadow of his house, hands shoved in his pockets. His beard concealed an amused smile.

"You gonna restore her?" Jordan wanted to know.

"Maybe. There's a Mustang out back I'm tinkering with. Hey, boys." Sam and Dean had finally made it to the party.

"Hey, Bobby," said Dean.

"I saw you on the news. Again."

"It's not their fault Casper lived in a mall," Jordan said defensively, and Bobby gave her a smile that told her he'd been kidding around.

"C'mon in," Bobby said to them. "Beer's in the fridge."

* * *

Jordan flopped down onto the bed, sighing happily. Sleeping arrangements at Bobby's were _far_ improved from the motel situation. At first they'd traded off sleeping in the Impala, but that just meant an endless cycle of back pain, so eventually it became Jordan switching every so often between the boys' beds—her head decorously pointed towards the foot, of course. Now she had her own bed—hell, her own room!

She could hear the guys talking downstairs, and though they were trying to be quiet about it, voices carried for miles in old houses like these, and she had no trouble at all making out the words.

"You just gonna babysit her, then?" That was Bobby.

"I don't know if I'd call it babysitting," said Sam, and Dean added, "She's a natural, Bobby."

That made her smile. Maybe she'd come out the other side of this with a new job description. Jordan Delaine, monster hunter and wanted felon. That sounded about right. It beat the hell out of Jordan Delaine, mall slave.

She'd have to convince the boys to teach her, though. She could shoot a little from the days when her daddy was alive, and her driving skills weren't too shabby if she did say so herself, but the ins and outs of monster killing were another thing entirely. Her first question—if she did manage to enroll in the Winchester School of Hunting—was going to be "how many monsters _are_ there?" quickly followed by "how do I off them?"

Jordan Delaine, exterminator.

No. Jordan Delaine—_terminator_.

This made her laugh, which halted the discussion below. She got up from the bed and went back downstairs, this time barefoot, because while she loved her Norkus heels, they were slightly implausible. She got a beer out of the fridge, because they all had one and she wanted one too, and sat down between the boys.

"Yo," she said, and popped off the top of beer using the edge of the table. "This place kicks ass. I have my own bed, there's a '65 GTO outside that needs love pronto, and I spy with my little eye some bacon in the fridge. Do you know how long it's been since I was allowed to eat bacon?" They looked at her. "Years. _Years_. But Audrey's not here to guilt me about my thighs now. I think I just found heaven."

"There is nothing wrong with your thighs," Dean said mildly, and Sam kicked him under the table.

"Thanks, sweetheart, but that's because I haven't been eating things like _bacon_." Jordan let out a laugh, true and loud and happy. An odd look crossed Bobby's face, and Jordan felt her enthusiasm dampen in response. "What?"

"No one's laughed like that in this house in a long time," Bobby answered with a straight face. Jordan's eyes moved from Bobby to Sam to Dean, but none of them were smiling, none of them saying "just kidding!"

Jordan sent Bobby her sweetest smile. "It's a good thing I got here when I did, then."

* * *

Somewhere Jordan had found an old CD player. The wiring was faulty, but she'd broken it open and fixed that, and now it played just fine. She had it set up on the counter of the bathroom, plugged into the wall, so that she could sing along while she was in the shower. Her luck was good—in the back of an old Dodge, she'd found an Aerosmith CD.

"_Hey little darlin', your love is legendary_!" Jordan bellowed at the ceiling. "_Love's four letters ain't in my dictionary, 'scuse my position but it ain't missionary—_"

"Hey, Sinatra!" Dean yelled through the door. "Some of us have to pee!"

"So use the toilet!" Jordan yelled back. "It's not like it's locked!—_When it comes to making love I ain't no hype, ha-ha, 'cause I practice on a peach most every night_!"

"Your singing sucks," Dean said, coming in.

"So do your omelets."

"Shut up and look away, will you?"

"_You _shut up," Jordan said snappily, but she turned anyway, and hummed at the wall instead. Just under the sound of the shower she could hear the sound of him pissing, and even though it made her feel like a kid of five, she found herself giggling.

"You are such a child," Dean muttered, shoulders hunched.

"Has anyone ever told you your peeing sounds like rain?" Jordan countered.

"_Christ_!"

"That is not my name," said Jordan, and belted out, "_Love in an elevator, livin' it up when I'm goin' down, love in an elevator—_"

"I want to strangle you so badly right now," Dean growled at the shower door, zipping up his pants. He nearly jumped out of his skin when Jordan opened the shower door a crack, hair slicked back, lips grinning.

"What's stopping you, hot stuff?"

Dean stared at her.

"I'm kidding," Jordan said impatiently, grin turning mischievous. "Go away, would you? I'd like to get out of the shower now. Unless you intend to help me."

"You're worse than I am," Dean told her.

"Thanks for the compliment, ducks. Now do you mind?"

Dean stared at her for a moment longer, looking at her like she was a new breed of human he'd never come across before, before slipping out the bathroom. She could hear him saying on the other side, "Next time, I'm peeing out by the Fords."

Jordan laughed to herself and shut off the water. She loved the boys, and liked Bobby quite a lot for the short time she'd known him, but Bobby was right: there wasn't a whole lot of laughter in this place. In _them_. Someone needed to perk them up everyone now and then, or they'd turn into zombies.

Towel wrapped securely around her middle and knotted over her chest, Jordan stepped up to the mirror and wiped off the steam until her reflection appeared. Her cheeks were rosy, and the circles under her eyes had gone; she was still smiling, too, even though the joke was long since over. She couldn't remember ever looking—hell, feeling!—this happy.

"So it's just for them, huh?" Jordan asked her reflection. "You're sticking around for purely humanitarian purposes?"

So, yeah, the Winchesters (which, she supposed, included Bobby) needed a clown in the family. A clown that wasn't Dean, for while he had his fair share of pranks and jokes, he had a hell of a lot of melancholy baggage on his shoulders, and it showed. His brand of jokes ran towards the dry and insulting, really. They needed some bubbly, and they needed it badly.

The added benefit to all this was that Jordan had escaped (literally) her long line of dead-end mall jobs, and found herself smack dab in the middle of a world that seemed to just beg her to stay. _Jordan_! it said. _It's meant to be! This is where you belong, chickadee_!

She pulled on an old sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants she'd cropped off to be daisy-dukes, getting ready to start working on the GTO. Bobby had told her, more or less, that if she could fix it, she could have it. The last time she'd worked on a car, she was fifteen, but Jordan thought she could do it, and she could always beg Dean to help her if she needed to.

Usually, after dressing, she'd have whipped out her bag of tricks and laid on hundreds of dollars' worth of creams and powders, but that particular bag of tricks was back at her apartment, and all she had in her purse was moisturizer, plus some emergency eyeliner and mascara. So she gave her cheeks a quick pat, smacked her lips, and called it good. Her morning routine had gone from an hour and a half to fifteen minutes, and if she was being honest, she loved it.

In the kitchen, the boys were looking at a bag of apples.

"—don't know how to make pie," Dean was saying, as Jordan came in, tying the wet length of her hair back into a ponytail.

"Who can't make pie?" asked Jordan.

"Us," said Dean, looking mournfully down at the apples.

Jordan tched. "Speak for yourself. I had a grandmother, you know."

Their heads swiveled around to look at her, just a little too eagerly, and Jordan rolled her eyes. "What, you want me to make you pie?" she demanded. "Why is it _my_ job? Because I'm a girl?"

"Or because none of us know how to bake," Sam pointed out.

"It's not my fault your momma didn't train you right," Jordan said, and their expressions went from eager to completely shut-down. Her eyebrows came up. "What?"

"She might have trained us right," Dean said mildly, "if she hadn't died when we were little."

"In a fire," Sam added.

"A _demon_ fire."

"Demonic fire," Sam corrected.

"No, a—look, does it matter?" Sam shook his head. Dean turned back to Jordan, to begin again, but she held up her hands.

"I get it," she said. "No biggie, guys. We don't have to play show-and-tell. I'll make the pie after I finish giving the GTO a once over, okay?"

"I love you," said Dean.

"I love you too, darlin'," Jordan replied sweetly, and patted his cheek. She took an apple from the bag, bit it, and walked out of the house with a swinging, lasses-faire gate. The brothers watched her go wearing identically struck expressions.

"I am _so_ glad we didn't take that sewer monster job in Maine," Dean said suddenly.

"You can say _that_ again," said Sam, before Jordan had gone too far to hear any more.

* * *

Audrey found another envelope in her mailbox, though this one was brown, with Jordan's handwriting across the front. She tore into it right there in the hall, and laughed aloud when she saw the picture that slipped out. It was of Jordan, riding on Sam's back, laughing and waving her hand in the air; Dean was standing over a carburetor, grease on his hands, caught in mid-eye roll.

_Yeehaw!_ The back read. _Having a blast, babe! I'm restoring an old GTO :) It's going to be gorgeous, I wish you could see it! The boys say hi :)_

_Love, Jordan_

_xoxoxo_

_

* * *

_

The GTO was coming along well, but that wasn't why Jordan was excited. Not even close. After a month and a half of living at Bobby's, the brothers were getting restless. So when they'd caught wind of a vampire nest in Albuquerque, they jumped at it—until they remembered Jordan.

"It's vampires, dude," Sam said, sitting on the couch. They were all gathered in Bobby's office to talk it over. "I mean, yeah, she's done a poltergeist and a gremlin, but—"

"I wouldn't call gremlins friendly," commented Bobby. "Are you worried she'll freak out?"

Dean scrutinized her face, unsmiling for once, and then shook his head. "She'll be okay," he said. "That's not what I'm worried about."

"You're worried they'd take me down before I could even get my gun up," Jordan said suddenly. They all looked at her. "Or you think I can't defend myself if I lose my gun. Which is it?"

"Both," said Sam and Dean together.

Jordan got to her feet, feet spread in an easy stance. "Hit me."

Dean started to shake his head, so she hauled off and hit him instead, landing a heck of a left hook right on his chin, and sending him spiraling to the ground. He sat there for a moment, stunned, before remembering that he should be standing up. He used the edge of the desk to pull himself back up.

"_Hit_ me," Jordan insisted, and this time he obeyed. She ducked swiftly and stuck her fist into his kidney, doubling him over, and then punched him in the side of the head, but that was the end of Dean's patience, and he took her by the waist and threw her neatly to the ground. She kicked his feet out and rolled to her feet, but Dean tripped her, and when she landed, he was already there, straddling her waist and pinning her gently by the throat.

"Okay," he said. "So you can fight."

"I went to a school with metal detectors," Jordan answered. He rolled off of her, and she sat up with only a slight _oomph_. "I can brawl."

"Noted," said Sam.

Jordan rested her hands on her hips, elbows splayed backward, and raised her eyebrows at them. "So. Any more objections?"

When no one answered, she said, "I didn't think so," and punched the air. A grin split her face. "I cannot _wait_ to kill myself a bloodsucker!"

"Aww," said Bobby. "I remember when you used to say things like that, Dean."

Jordan winked at Dean. "I bet you were the cutest baby hunter in the continental US, huh?"

To all of their surprise, Dean blushed.


	2. Jordan's First Hunt

Chapter two! It was going to be longer, but I decided that ending where I did had a nice sense of finality to Jordan's first hunt, so - yes. :) Where or where could this go next?

* * *

Jordan Delaine's back was aching. Her ankle burned, she was pretty sure one her nails had gotten ripped off, and there was a slick wetness trickling down her neck that said the thrashing she'd gotten had done more than just bruise.

She clamped down tighter on tomahawk, hearing nothing in the silence but her ragged breathing, but knowing—_knowing_—that they were out there.

Watching.

"Come and get me, dipshit," Jordan snarled, and from the shadows came answering roar; the female leapt out of hiding, moving impossibly fast. She was on top of Jordan before she even had time to turn, but Jordan had expected that, and had a tomahawk buried in the girl-vamp's throat to prove it. Thin hands scrabbled at her face, but a neat twist of the tomahawk's grip did away with that. Jordan shoved the beheaded body off, face and chest drenched with lukewarm blood—that, she had long since decided, was the creepiest part about vampires; their blood was never as hot as a human's—and dragged free her tomahawk.

One down, two to go. A yell and a shrill scream sounded from beyond the barn's confines, truncated abruptly at the end. Okay, so one to go. Jordan crept towards the perimeter of the barn, eyes wide, ears perked, trying to search out the last vampire. There had been six of them at the start of this, but instead of fighting together, they'd scattered to the four winds, a bad strategy if she'd ever heard one. She and the Winchesters picked them off, one by one (this one made Jordan's second girl) and they'd worked their way down to the head honcho, the male, if that girlish scream from outside was anything to go by.

"You think you can kill me?" a whispered voice said, and it came from everywhere, from above, below, and all around—impossible to pinpoint. "What do you know about death, child?"

"Ask your girlfriend," Jordan answered, and the voice hissed.

"Jordan?" Sam's voice called. Jordan opened her mouth to answer, but the shadows in the loft had solidified into a man-shaped bit of darkness. A _huge_ man-shaped bit of darkness. Whoever this guy had been before he'd turned, he looked like a World's Strongest Man wannabe. He was at least as tall as Sam, but broad as a redwood, thick in a way that said not "I'd like a burger and some fries" but "I bench four hundred pounds and I eat raw eggs for breakfast."

"Oh shit," Jordan said, and the vampire laughed.

Before she could even blink, he had thrown her against one of the barn's supports, her back giving a nasty _crack_ that didn't bode well. She swiped at him with the tomahawk and got him, she was pretty sure, but it didn't slow him down at all. A moment later her tomahawk was gone—somehow—and she was fighting bare-handed against Gigantor the Unfriendly Vampire.

She did the first thing she could think of, and grabbed a broken rake, the wooden handle fractured into a stake. With her other hand she drew her dagger, given to her by Dean just this morning. The vampire attacked again, moving to avoid the dagger, and Jordan put every ounce of her weight into driving the rake handle into his chest instead. It worked—she saw it work—but he just laughed at her. So she punched him, right in the mouth, knowing full well it wouldn't do a lick a good, and his answer was to grab her by the throat and squeeze.

Except that he didn't squeeze long, because Dean's long machete had hewn its way through Gigantor's neck, and the vampire dropped like a sack of potatoes. Jordan coughed, rubbing at her throat, and then kicked the body square in the nads. "Steroids are _bad_!" she yelled at the corpse.

Sam grinned at her, machete leaning against one wide shoulder. "Personal experience?"

"Shut up," Jordan grumbled. Now she had a bruised throat to add to the list, which was—_so_ awesome. She turned to Dean with a wide grin on her face and said, "He was _huge_! I can't wait to tell Bobby!"

Dean laughed at her. "You are such a freak, Delaine."

"Says the guy with a bloody machete."

"Touché," said Sam, and they all grinned.

"You know," Jordan said, as they walked back to the Impala, parked safely out on the street, "this makes it official."

"Makes what official?" asked Sam.

"I just killed two vampires. _Alone_. I'd say that makes me a hunter, don't you?"

Sam and Dean exchanged a look. Once upon a time, those looks had been impossible for Jordan to decipher, but she'd been bobbing in their wake for almost three months now. They hadn't been a mystery in ages. This one said, _Oh God_, and Dean's little sigh in response said, _Now we've done it_.

"I'd say it takes more than a few vamps to make you a hunter," said Dean, ducking inside the Impala. Jordan threw her head back, looking at the stars, and sighed, "This is such _bullshit_."

"You're not even close to being ready to fly solo, cupcake," Dean told her. "Get in the car."

"I will be, though."

"Sure. _Get in the car_."

"Quit your nagging, mother," Jordan snapped, and climbed in behind Sam. She folded her arms across her chest, intending to pout, but the next thing out of her mouth was, "Did you _see _the job I did with that tomahawk? Awesome, right?"

Dean rolled his eyes. "A real masterpiece."

* * *

Just off the highway—literally; the front office was visible from the far lane—was the motel they'd decided on, not by popular demand, but by sheer exhaustion. Dean didn't want to drive a single mile further, and neither Sam nor Jordan could be prevailed upon to take over. Thus the crummy little Roadside Motel (inventive name, that) became their home for the night.

"Which bed?" Sam asked, eyes half-lidded as he tugged off his over-shirt, in preparation of a long night's sleep.

Jordan gave an experimental sniff in his direction, and then Dean's, and said immediately: "Yours. Dean smells worse."

"I'm flattered," Dean grumbled, while Sam grinned. Jordan pulled off the hoodie she was wearing and kicked off her shoes. They were sneakers, things she wouldn't have been caught dead wearing in her mall days, but they were far better than the boots Dean had suggested. They'd looked like she was planning on joining a commando unit. So, she picked the baby blue sneakers instead (a god-awful color for shoes) and told herself to live with them, and by the end of the week, she'd loved them more than she'd loved any piece of clothing in her life.

Sam flopped down onto the bed first, but Jordan wasn't far behind. This time, though, her head was pointed the same direction as his. When he lifted a quizzical eyebrow at her, she pointed at his feet. "You may smell better," she told him, "but your feet are a different story."

Dean snickered.

They were all of them asleep more or less by the time their heads hit the pillows, sinking into luxuriant and peaceful darkness, a darkness that promised to momentarily remove them from their laundry list of war wounds. Jordan found herself looking into that darkness and saw, instead of dreams and relaxation, wide eyes and gleaming teeth. The euphoria of her first real vampire hunt dropped away, leaving only terror behind, but it was a moldy terror, left over from before and already decaying.

_Then let me remind you_, said the darkness, and dark fingers, impossibly huge, closed around her throat. Jordan tried to latch onto the easy bravado she'd had before, but it wouldn't come. It didn't make since. She'd done this before. She could do it. She could.

_But not alone._

She'd been alone before.

_Is that so? And who, pray tell, was it who took off Gigantor's head?_

The nickname she'd given the last vampire had been funny before—now it was only sinister, and left a bad taste in her mouth, like ash and boiled eggs. Her eyes opened further and further, until her eyelids ached, but they could not open wide enough to accommodate her terror. She was going to die. Alone. The boys weren't on the peripheral, waiting to come if she needed them.

Alone.

_You're alone_…

Jordan looked into the shadow's face and screamed.

* * *

Sam's face was above her, his big hands pressed on either side of her head, and his voice was saying, over and over again, "Shh, Jory, shh, it's all right, it's okay, we're here. You're safe." Jory. That was what her dad had called her, before he died. She realized she was still screamed and clamped her teeth together so hard that they clicked, but painful whimpering sounds were still emerging from her throat, and would not stop. There were tears on her cheeks that she didn't remember crying.

Sam's thumb came across and gently passed over the salty droplets, drawing them away, and he said, "No one's going to hurt you. Do you believe that? You've got us, remember? We won't let anything happen to you."

She knew that. Of course she knew that. She had perfect faith in them, unshakeable faith, and that was what had fueled her bravery in the barn. The hard part came when she tried to imagine fighting without them. She sucked in a shaky breath, and her hands, knotted tightly in Sam's shirt, came loose. She realized that Dean was crouching beside the bed, one hand over his mouth, and stuck out a hand to him. After a moment, he took it.

"Sorry," Jordan said. "Sorry. I was—dreaming. That I was alone."

"You're not alone, kid," Dean told her, lacing his fingers through hers. His calluses tickled her palm. "You're family, and family sticks together."

She couldn't help herself. "Does that make me your sister? Because if so, those ménage à trois dreams I had when we first met are incest and definitely illegal."

They smiled at her, and Sam said, "Honorary cousin, then. Twice removed."

"Legal but still dirty," said Jordan. "I like it."

"I was serious, you know," Dean said. Sam nodded his agreement.

"Good," said Jordan. "Because—" Her tone had said she was getting ready to crack another joke, but she faltered, and said instead, "I'm not sure how I lived _without_ you guys, actually."

"I remember what it was like before you," Sam said. Jordan and Dean looked at him with identically offended expressions. "It sucked. Comparatively."

"Aww," said Jordan, and flicked his chin. "Enough with the touchy-feely, boys. Let's get some sleep."

"Yes ma'am," Dean answered, with a snappy salute, and went back to his own bed. This time when Jordan fell asleep, though, she fell asleep holding Sam's hand, and dreamed good dreams.


	3. Jordan Throws a Party

The chapter in which things change. Don't hate me! :)

* * *

Nowadays, Audrey lived for mailman. He brought envelopes, and envelopes occasionally held treasures like the one in her hands. She had a whole stack of them now, one for every month. Her favorite thus far had been the one where Jordan, Sam, and Dean were all in the kitchen, covered in flour and pie filling, after Jordan had tried (and failed) to teach the boys how to make their own pie.

The one she was holding topped that one without even _trying_.

Jordan was standing in front of the finished GTO, arms spread proudly out, and leaning against the car were Sam and Dean, wearing jeans and nothing else. They were trying to scowl, but there were smiling hovering around the edges of their lips and at the corner of their eyes. Audrey spent a full minute staring at the photo (those _abs_) before she realized she'd been holding her breath, and flipped the picture over.

_Audrey! It's finished! We're throwing a party :) I wish you could come! It's going to be fabulous, even if it's going to be a party of four. I told the boys to invite everyone they knew, but wouldn't you know it, pretty much everyone they know is dead. Bummer! But Dean said he'd figure something out, which I guess means he's going to invite a lot of hunters. That's my boys for you—they play where they work. Or work where they play, I guess. Sam and Dean send hugs and kisses!_

_Love, Jordan_

_P.S. They're shirtless just for you, sweetie! I bribed them with pie :)_

Audrey had never loved Jordan more.

* * *

Jordan knew that Sam and Dean weren't the party type—the _partying_ type, maybe, but they were definitely not born-and-bred hosts. Not to mention that their idea of a party was a bar, a keg, and a pool table. Even Sam, who liked to pretend he was a little more high-brow, looked baffled when she suggested something more.

_More?_ their expressions had said. _What more do you do at a party?_

Instead of stressing them out with details, Jordan made them lists. She called them Honey-Do lists and laughed whenever they grumbled about it, because she knew as well as they did that they were loving every minute of it. Honey-Do lists, unlike most things in their life, were normal.

The party itself wasn't hard at all to think up, but throwing it all together proved a little more difficult. Kegs had to be bought, plus a wide selection of the best hard liquor Bart's Quikie-Mart had to offer, and playlists had to be made. She used Sam's laptop for the last, and spent an entire afternoon using up all his CDs on a mullet-man's fantasy mix of classic rock. Then, because she did not consider liquor the first and last word in partying, she drew up a menu and set to work making the decorations.

The food was to be as follows: steak, chicken, baked beans, mini sandwiches, salad, veggie platters, bread baskets, chips, salsa, and jalapeno poppers. It would be distributed at regular intervals throughout the night so that no one would be hungry—ever—and it'd end with pie and ice cream.

The decorations, on the other hand, were balloons to be tied to the GTO's side mirrors, a handwritten banner that said "HELL YEAH I DID IT", and a party dress. For her, of course. Jordan's long legs and narrow waist made a fabulous frame for party dresses. Going shopping wasn't really an option, because the credit cards would eventually be shut down, and the longer they used them, the faster that day would come. It would be frivolous to use them on clothes, and besides, the places Jordan shopped at—or used to—always asked for ID. So Jordan made her own.

She stole one of Sam's shirts (she liked Dean's colors better, but Sam was taller, and therefore his shirts gave her more fabric to work with) and took the sewing kit from Bobby's closet, and went to town. The waist was short, and then flared out at the hips; she didn't have to worry about a neckline, either, just made it a sweetheart, and put her leather puff-sleeve jacket over it. A spit shine and some handy repair work made her Norkus heels new again, and her outfit was complete—almost.

"Dean?" Jordan whispered, peeking round the doorway at him. He looked up from the newspaper he was reading and squinted at her. "Do you think I could borrow your ring for tonight?"

He looked baffled. "Why?"

"Because I need it for my outfit, that's why." She held out a hand. "Gimme."

Sam's response, when she asked for his leather bracelet, was pretty much the same—but they both forked over the requested items without a fuss, and Jordan's outfit was perfect.

"Wow," said Dean, when she came out to show him her handiwork. "Not too shabby, Delaine."

Jordan's lips, shined with a little chapstick, smiled. "Thanks, Winchester."

She took a peek at herself in the hall mirror as she passed to check on the food, just to check on her make up. It wasn't much—just eyeliner and mascara—but she'd managed to make herself look pretty damn good anyhow, and she'd twisted her hair back into the classier version of her usual ponytail, letting it poof a little on top and leaving the rest to drape down her back in a smooth line. Audrey would be proud of her for making do with so little.

There were things to do, though, and so Jordan moved on, and eventually forgot to be proud of her outfit at all.

Her stab at catering was going well, mostly because Sam was the grillmeister and Bobby, as it turned out, mixed a mean salad. She had Dean on chop duty, since he seemed to be unable to do anything that didn't involve a weapon, and with all the guys busy with their chores, it gave her enough time to get the pie started.

It was all very domestic and un-Winchester, right up until Jordan saw, with her own two eyes, a man in a trench coat appear out of thin air.

She nearly dropped the pie, she was so startled. She looked at him, and he looked at her, the both of them wearing the same mildly puzzle, generally intrigued expression. "Did you just—" Jordan began uncertainly.

"—appear out of thin air?" the man finished. "Indeed."

Dean turned to look. "Cas! Yo! You're early, pal."

"On the contrary," was the reply. "This was the designated time. If there was a deviation, it was a matter of seconds."

"Is that your name?" Jordan asked. "Cas?"

"I am Castiel," he answered. "Dean thinks it is amusing to nickname me."

"Oh, you're a party _animal_, I can tell," Jordan told him, grinning, to which Castiel cocked his head to the side. The movement was very precise, as if he had measured the degree exactly.

"Sarcasm?" he inquired.

"Never," said Jordan. She gave his tie a tug. "It's always the stiff ones who really let loose after a few drinks."

"Mm, no," said Dean, intently chopping tomatoes for the salad. "Castiel is an angel. Booze doesn't work the same."

"No, it does," Castiel disputed, with a neat shake of the head. "It is a question of—quantity."

"So how much we talking?" asked Jordan.

Dean glanced up from his tomatoes. "A lot."

"Like ten shots too many, or the whole bottle?"

"Like the whole _inventory_."

"Oh," Jordan said, and then gave Castiel's cheek a gentle pat. "Well then. That just means you're a challenge, doesn't it? We'll talk more about this angel business later, sweetheart. In the meantime, give this to Sam." She handed him a bottle of barbeque sauce, to be dumped over the chicken, which he then dutifully took outside, though it looked a little like he was marching. Jordan watched him go with a smile that crinkled the edges of her dark eyes.

"He's like a toy soldier," she commented.

"Except that Castiel's guns are real." But Dean was smiling anyway.

"Sure," said Jordan, conceding that point, "but look at him. He's adorable. Perfect snuggle material, without a doubt."

"Geeze, Jordan."

"Sorry," she said, but her smile was unrepentant. "Anyone else coming to our soirée?"

Dean shrugged. "I don't know. Cas was the only one on my list who could make it. Ask Sam."

Ask Sam it is, thought Jordan, and she went out to where the barbeque was set up. Sam had taken off his over-shirt in deference to the heat, leaving only his T-shirt behind, and with the barbequing fork in one hand and a sauce brush in the other, he looked a Food Network version of Sylvester Stallone.

"Hey there, hottie," said Jordan, chuckling over the image in her head. Sam flashed her a smile and reached out an arm, and Jordan obligingly came to his side and put her arms around his middle. Dean was her go-to guy for dirty jokes and hard-nosed advice, and Sam was her guy for hugs and deep conversation.

"Like the dress," Sam commented. "That shirt never looked so good."

Jordan's eyebrows rose. "Take it easy, Tex. You're starting to sound like your brother."

"I believe he was serious," Castiel supplied helpfully from Sam's other side, a safe distance from the barbeque.

"Sorry," said Sam, opting to ignore Castiel. "Are you out here for my sterling company, or did I forget to do something on my list?"

"Neither. I was wondering if you'd invited anybody."

"Oh, that."

She pulled away a little, just enough so that she could look up at his face, which he was trying to arrange into a semblance of normality—but there was a smile in his eyes and his eyebrows kept twitching up like he was going to laugh. "_Sam_. Who'd you invite?"

"Who says I invited anyone?" Now he really _was_ smiling.

"_Sammy_," Jordan whined, and dug her fingers into his waist until he had to drop his tools and try to drag them away. (Sam was ticklish. Slightly. Or at least, he'd used to be _slightly_ ticklish, until Jordan of the Tickle Fingers came along, and showed him how real tickling was done—in a non-dirty, strictly platonic way, of course.)

"Go tickle Dean," Sam gasped at her, trying to get away, but Jordan wasn't having any of it.

"Dean would _punch_ me. His reflexes aren't exactly tickle-friendly. Tell me what I want to know, comrade, or I'll bring out the big guns."

By "big guns," of course, Jordan meant that she'd sit on him, and tickle him until he cried. The fact that she could do it at all had nothing to do with Jordan's prowess, but rather that Sam, who was the Hulk, never tried to throw her off. Dean had no problems whatsoever putting her back in her place, but there seemed to be a disconnect somewhere in Sammy, as if he couldn't quite bring himself to judo her.

"If you could be _patient_, you'd see," Sam said, and her fingers stopped. He let out a relieved sigh.

"How many?"

"One."

"Promise?"

"Cross my heart and hope to die, Jory."

Good enough. She stepped away, intending to go back into the house, but up the road a car was coming, a silver car—a Toyota—a _Camry_, with a dent in the left front bumper, where Audrey had driven it into a pole. (She'd been aiming for her boyfriend.) Jordan let out a sound like she'd been smacked, and then lurched into a run. The Camry slid to a dusty halt, and then Audrey was out of her car and running too, and they collided so hard that they fell, hard, against one of Bobby's junkers.

Jordan found she was crying, but then, so was Audrey, and neither of them were big on the waterworks. They'd only been apart what, four months? but it was long enough. Audrey had cut her brown hair short, so that they no longer looked like twins, with long luxuriant waves down their backs. That was probably because while Jordan's waves were real, Audrey's was not; it'd taken a lot of work to keep that hairstyle up.

"I love your hair," Jordan babbled, and did not care that she was babbling. "Your shoes! Ohmygod. Is that the new Coach bag? I love it. God. It's gorgeous. _You're_ gorgeous. Sam called you, didn't he? He did. God!"

Audrey was laughing at her. It wasn't often her best friend got so flustered, and it seemed to validate—at least for Audrey—that Jordan had really missed her after all, even with hunks for company. "You're ruining your makeup, sweetheart," Audrey said kindly, wiping away the leaking mascara.

"I don't _care_," cried Jordan, and hugged her again. Before she'd met Sam and Dean, Audrey had been the only family Jordan had.

"What's all the ruckus?" Bobby asked. "We could hear someone screaming from inside the house."

"I may or may not have called her friend Audrey," said Sam, and Jordan abruptly stopped hugging Audrey, turned, and ran back. She grabbed Sam's face and kissed him, hard, on the mouth. Then she ran back to Audrey, leaving a stunned silence in her wake, and totally oblivious to it.

"You should have called Audrey sooner," said Dean, and Sam turned scarlet.

Jordan had taken Audrey's hand and was dragging her towards the GTO, freshly painted a hot rod red, and was gleefully prattling on about what she'd done about it, even though Audrey knew precisely nothing about the way cars worked.

After Jordan had had a chance to work through her excitement (these things took time) Audrey looped her arm through hers, and said, "You want to give me the juicy details now, babe?"

Jordan's brown eyes blinked a few times, rapidly, as she tried to remember what exactly Audrey was referring to. She came up empty, and looked to her friend for help, which was when she caught sight of the elaborate kissy face Audrey was making. She grinned. "Oh, that?"

"Oh, _that_. Like you didn't just kiss one of the hottest men on the planet."

"It was a _thank you_ kiss. It wasn't like I made out with him. Besides, it's just Sam."

As soon as Jordan said it, she knew she was in trouble. Audrey's eyebrows rose—and rose—and her lips pursed in the too familiar oh-really-now position. Clamping down on Jordan's arm, Audrey spun her neatly to the left, facing her towards the brothers. They were talking together by the barbeque, drinking beers. Audrey pointed. "They're so gorgeous I'm having difficulty breathing at thirty paces, Jordan!"

"I'm aware that they're pretty," said Jordan, sulking.

"So you're telling me that you live with this godlike creatures, occasionally kiss them, and think nothing of it?"

"I've slept in the same bed as them a couple times too. Nothing ever happened, and nothing will. That's just how it is, sissy."

"Don't 'sissy' _me_," Audrey snapped. She pulled Jordan's face around so that they were staring eye-to-eye. "Don't lie to me, Jordan. You've been out here in the middle of nowhere—with them—for _months_. I know they weren't keeping you captive, either, and you're too independent not to have struck out on your own unless you wanted to stay."

Jordan's expression was childlike. "They're family," she said, in a tiny voice.

"_I'm_ family. _They're_ man candy."

"So what are you saying, things can't be platonic?" Jordan demanded.

"Jesus, Jordan. Listen to yourself. You can't be platonic with a guy unless he's _gay_. That's the first rule of being a woman, and you know it better than anyone." Jordan flinched—it was a low blow, bringing that up. Jordan had been friends with a guy named Gregory for nearly a year before finding out he was in love with her, and when she'd rejected him on the spot, he'd spent the next month calling at three AM and stalking her house.

"It's not the same," said Jordan.

"So you don't feel anything for them? Nothing at all?"

"Don't, Audrey," Jordan said. She was staring at the GTO with a wild look in her eyes, something scared and very different from anything Audrey had ever seen in her friend before. "I need them, I can't—"

"Hey," Audrey said, and put an arm around her shoulders. "It's okay. I'm just being nosy. Maybe you're the exception to the rule and you guys can all stay platonic forever. I watch too many soap operas."

Jordan looked at the boys, _her_ boys, and felt like she was going to be sick. Audrey was right about one thing: relationships never stayed the same. They changed, they mutated, they became something else. Whatever Jordan and the boys were today, that wasn't what they were going to be tomorrow.

And for a reason she couldn't name, it scared the hell out of her.


	4. Dancing a la Castiel

Chapter four! :) There's more Castiel goodness here, because while at first it may have appeared that my love was solely for the boys, Cas really is one of my favorite characters. I find him eternally sweet, even when he's trying to be a hardass. He's like a teddy bear who grew up in Nazi Germany, or something.

Anyway. I wanted to say thank you to everyone who's left reviews! Whenever my enthusiasm flags, it's those reviews that keep me wanting to write :) All it takes is seeing your comments and it's like BAM. Inspiration. This chapter is almost solely a product of that kind of lightning-rod excitement. (Pathetic? Maybe - but I love you all anyway!)

And now back to your regular programming!

* * *

It was nothing like the fifty-people-strong bashes she and Audrey had used to throw in college, but Jordan's GTO party did well enough anyway. She'd gotten everyone reasonably drunk (or at the very least, buzzed) and in Castiel's case, had spent the better part of an hour teaching him how to dance. That was entertainment enough to have everyone there laughing until they cried, especially when Jordan grabbed Castiel's ass, just to be able to say that she'd groped an angel. The look on Castiel's face was one of stunned confusion, which only made it better.

"Do you hate it?" Jordan asked, when Castiel had finally grasped the concept of a two-step, and swayed her around the living room with mild grace.

One of Castiel's eyebrows quirked up. "No," he said. "It is actually rather—enjoyable."

"You owe me for life now, you know that, right?"

Castiel's eyes narrowed.

"What happens if you get married?" Jordan explained. "Your first dance would be a disaster. At least now you can stand up with your head high."

"Marriage," said Castiel, as if trying out the word. He looked sincerely confused. "Who would I marry?"

"Me!" shrieked Audrey, dancing with Dean. "Trade me partners, Jordan, quick!"

"You're wasted," Jordan laughed, but went to Dean anyway. Audrey draped herself over Castiel, who looked, very suddenly, as if he needed to go to the bathroom. (Jordan doubted that was his problem. More likely, it had something to do with the smell of Audrey's breath.)

"Nice party," Dean said to her, as she tucked her arms up around his neck. He knotted his hands at the small of her back and swayed. It was a very intimate dance, and very nice, but Jordan had a sneaking suspicion it was also the only way Dean _could_ dance.

"Thanks." Jordan smiled over his shoulder at Audrey, who was now trying to kiss Castiel. Castiel's head was straining backward while he tried to keep his body in the same shape Jordan had put him in ("This is called your frame, Cas, and I want you to hold there no matter what, okay?") the result of which was very awkward. "Cas doesn't party much, does he?"

Dean grinned down at her. "Nope. I took him to a whorehouse once. Bad, bad idea—but a crap load of fun."

"Whorehouse, huh?"

"Too much info? Soiled my reputation?" His smile had turned wicked and his eyes were glittering, a sure sign that he was teasing her.

Jordan looked up at him through her lashes, the failing daylight casting long shadows across her cheekbones. She affected a sweet Southern drawl. "Why, Dean Winchester, you nasty, nasty man." She shrugged and dropped the drawl. "I don't have you on a pedestal, sweetie. I was more surprised by the fact that you'd—you know—have to pay."

"Ouch," said Bobby, from his corner of the room.

"I don't," said Dean. "Cas, on the other hand …"

"Cas could get laid without ever opening his mouth," Jordan interrupted. "Look at those _hands_. You have sexy hands, Cas."

Castiel lifted one of his hands to look at it, and Audrey lost her balance. She went toppling sideways onto a chair and stayed there, dazed and giggling. Castiel's lips moved into a small—very small—smile. "It has been said."

Dean stopped dancing. "By _who_?"

"By any straight girl with eyes, probably," said Jordan, and gave Castiel a wink. He sent her a quick little nod in return.

"You have to stop saying things like that," Dean told her playfully, giving her a little dip that said her assumptions about his dancing skills might be a little off. "I might get jealous."

"God forbid!" said Jordan. "Now dance with me for _real_, Winchester."

He obligingly gave her a spin, and moved into a flawless waltz. Jordan knew better than to ask where he'd learned it. He certainly hadn't learned it from his father. The song changed, moving to a lower tempo, and Dean slowed down accordingly, though he still kept up the steps. He tugged her a little closer, but not play; he bent his head and whispered in her ear, "Take it easy with the kissing."

"What?" asked Jordan, surprised.

"Sam's a good kid," said Dean. "But things like that, they put ideas in his head, and once he gets it, he gets it _bad_. You understand?"

Jordan stopped dancing and looked up into his face, brows coming together into a frown. "And that'd be a bad thing?"

Dean's eyebrows shot up. "You _want_—"

"I didn't say that. But I'm not sure why it'd be a problem if I did. Would Sam care if the situation were reversed?"

"I don't know," said Dean, though the expression on his face said that he did.

"Look, I was just happy to see Audrey," Jordan said soothingly. "I probably would have kissed him even if he were fourteen and pimply. Well. Maybe not. But you get my drift. It didn't mean anything, so take a chill pill."

She patted his cheek and left.

* * *

Okay, the party _had_ been doing well enough, right up until Dean joined ranks with Audrey and went all Kiss Police on her. Suddenly unenthused with the idea of partying till dawn, she went outside to her GTO. The color was barely visible in the darkness, only a faint glimmer here and there where the lights from Bobby's house struck it. The effect was a little like wet blood, but the gruesomeness of that idea didn't stop her from sitting on the hood, her toes grazing the ground.

She wasn't hiding. Jordan Delaine didn't _hide_. And she wasn't sulking, either, or anything remotely like that—she was thinking. By herself. Outside. Stranger things had happened. Granted, usually when she needed to think, she just waited until bedtime rolled around. Her bed was always empty, and now, she was beginning to see, that was a _guarantee_. Oh, but that made it sound like she was hankering after a good lay, or something, and that wasn't true. She wasn't chasing after Sam with grabby hands, either. It was more like—if the opportunity came along, let's say, if the chance presented itself, she'd be nine kinds of crazy to say no.

Jordan heaved a sigh and hoped Dean wasn't going to talk to Sam about it. Things would get awkward fast, and that terrible premonition of change she'd had earlier would come true right before her eyes. This was totally Audrey's fault, too.

"Escaping the fun and games?" Sam's voice asked, nearly scaring her to death. Jordan looked over her shoulder at him, watching the silhouette of his shape come lumbering down from the porch. Okay, okay, so lumbering was a bit harsh. Sam didn't lumber. He was actually pretty quick on his feet, but he did sway—just a little—when he took a step.

"Something like that."

Sam jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Castiel's hiding from Audrey in the bathroom, if you want to go see."

"Ah—no, I think I'm good." She should have smiled, she realized, or laughed, because a drunk Audrey laying siege to Cas in a bathroom was her idea of a good joke. A fast frown crossed his face, almost like a twitch, and he came closer.

"You okay, Jordan?" She missed the Jory.

She blew air out through her lips noisily. "I'm fine! Duh. Just—um—enjoying the GTO."

"From the outside."

"Yeah. From the outside." He got up beside her, and she had a crazy moment of wondering if he'd dent the hood before deciding she didn't care. She could bang it out. Besides, he'd sat on the Impala, and the Impala had survived. "I just needed some air, honestly."

Sam nodded. And that was that. It was one of the reasons she loved the boys—they weren't such _girls_ about everything. Audrey would have bugged her and bugged her until she got some tidbit of info. Case in point: her arrival this afternoon. Jordan sighed again, earning a swift look from Sam, and she saw he was being patient with her, waiting for her to speak first. This was touching, because while Sam was no Audrey, he didn't have his tongue glued to the top of his mouth like Dean did, either. She'd heard him nagging Dean more than once - more like every _day_. He seldom had a reason to turn those talents on Jordan, but she could see him wanting to.

"They're all just—really concerned, I guess—that me giving you a kiss is symbolic of something besides undying gratitude."

"Mm," said Sam.

"But it's _not_. Right?" She turned her head to look at him, but he was gazing up at the stars. His profile was almost impossible to see, except where the lights from Bobby's house reflected in his eyes.

"Are you asking me if it _is_ symbolic or if I _want_ it to be symbolic?"

That came straight out of left field, and sounded a lot like a line to Jordan. She squinted at him. This was Sam, though. She couldn't even remember the last time he'd hit on a girl, even when they were in a bar. He wasn't really the type.

"I know it's symbolic," Jordan said instead. "Of _gratitude_. This is making mountains out molehills, don't you think? I bet you didn't even enjoy it," she added, as an afterthought, and felt immediately cheered. If Sam had had to gargle mouthwash afterward, her woes were over. She'd have a categorical denial for Audrey and Dean's worries.

Sam let out a weird cross between a cough and a laugh, shoving his hands down in his pockets. "Oh, yeah, it was _disgusting_."

"Is that sarcasm, Winchester?"

He raised his eyebrows at her. Even in the dark she could tell. "Of course it's sarcasm."

"Why 'of course'?" Jordan pressed the heels of her palms to her cheeks and rubbed tiredly at her eyes. Whatever mascara had survived this long was gone after the second pass. "This is a nightmare. I never think before I do things, that's my problem."

Sam didn't answer her, which she took to mean he agreed, and she hopped down from the GTO. "Well, now that I've ruined everything, I guess I'll go upstairs and go to bed. And maybe in the morning I'll go back home with Audrey. I bet the police have stopped looking for me by now, right?"

She didn't really mean it—the leaving thing—because leaving meant taking on a life she didn't want, and hadn't wanted even while she was living it. And it would mean leaving her boys, who she was pretty sure were now necessary for her to be a functioning human being. But from the look on Sam's face, he'd taken her seriously. One of his hands came free of its pocket and it grabbed her hand. He was gripping her hand too tight but she didn't say so, because Sam was the sort to take that kind of thing to heart.

"Don't even kid around," he said, harshly. "I know you don't like to share your feelings and all that, but Jory, before you came along we were in a serious rut. I'm not sure how much longer we could have gone without going insane or killing each other—or both. But we're _happy_ now. None of us—not Bobby, not Dean, not me—none of us want to go back to the way it was before."

Looks like she'd been right about them needing a clown, Jordan thought, and gave Sam's ear an affectionate tug, like he was a puppy she'd discovered doing something cute. "I could always stick around a while longer," Jordan decided.

"Dean would have killed you for saying that," Sam told her, rising to his feet. Jordan was the tallest among her friends at home—five eleven—but compared to Sam, she might as well have been four eleven. "Bobby, too. He didn't give you the GTO because he'd suddenly lost interest in it, you know."

"I get the point," Jordan said. "Leaving's out of the question. Are we ready to join humanity?"

"If you can call it that," said Sam, with a smirk, and together they went inside.

* * *

Audrey left the next morning despite a colossal hangover.

"If I didn't have to work," Audrey told them, standing bleary-eyed and pale on Bobby's porch, "I'd _shoot_ myself."

"I love you, dearest," said Jordan, and Audrey gave her a crushing hug.

"Don't you _dare_ stop sending pictures," Audrey added, as she walked towards her dented Camry. "They're the highlight of my life now."

"Sure thing," agreed Jordan. Audrey drove away in a cloud of dust. They all watched her go in silence, until Castiel let out a great sigh, and sat down on one of the porch chairs. Jordan laughed. "Yeah—Audrey can do that to a man."

"She was nice," commented Dean, in a tone that said it was for Jordan's benefit alone.

Jordan quirked a hip and batted her eyelashes at him. "I learned from the best!"

"I fail to understand what it is you learned from that woman," said Castiel. Jordan had a feeling that he'd been traumatized, possibly forever, by Audrey's unflagging enthusiasm.

"They're called feminine wiles, dear." Jordan took the seat beside him and leaned back, almost like she was going to tip it back against the wall, but at the last minute she stopped and straightened Castiel's tie instead. "She taught me everything I know about ensnaring a man. Audrey's a genius."

Castiel gazed at her solemnly. His blue eyes caught the light just right, and Jordan knew, deep down, that he really was an angel. But the feeling was _really _deep, two blocks further down than her heart, and could have been indigestion. "Whatever your talents may be," he told her, in that curious, rumbling voice of his, "they have very little to do with her."

"He means to say that you're in a slightly different class than your friend Audrey," translated Dean helpfully.

"Yeah, because Audrey's a _genius_."

Castiel looked away, just turned his head slightly, but it had the same effect as if he had rolled his eyes and huffed at her. Dean gave up, too, and went inside for an early morning coffee. He paused in the doorway. "Don't forget," he said to Jordan. "In two days we're heading to Missouri to check out a case."

"I'll be there, cowboy," replied Jordan, with an idle wave of her hand. She jerked forward in her chair suddenly, like she had been propelled out of it but caught herself at the last moment, and cried after him, "Can we take the GTO?"

"Sure!" Dean's voice called from inside, and Jordan let out a wild whoop.

Castiel looked at her for a moment with a pained squint, resenting the fact that she'd startled him, but seemed to think better of what he'd been thinking of saying, and closed his eyes instead. He looked as if he was meditating.

"Cas," Jordan said, and he peeked at her out of the corner of one eye. "When we leave in two days, say a prayer for us, will you?"

He smiled, the first real smile she'd ever seen on his face, and with perfect honesty Castiel said, "I will."

Jordan dropped a kiss on his cheek as she stood. "You're a real sweetheart, Cas. I mean it." She did, too; he couldn't stand Audrey, right from the start, but he'd put up with her for the entire night regardless. He'd even agreed to try dancing, even though she could tell by the look on his face that he'd thought it was a ridiculous idea. (She'd proved him wrong there!) Jordan went inside thinking that the Winchesters had exceptional taste in friends.

Out on the porch, Castiel was still smiling.


	5. On Angels

I'm pretty sure it's been at least a day longer than I usually go between updates, even though I had this chapter sketched out pretty much by the time I'd uploaded Chapter Four. This would be because of a thing my doctor called tendonitis, which is just his way of saying I've screwed up my wrists for the rest of my life, and have to deal with fun things like intense pain if I type too long. Usually it's not a problem, because with work and everything else, the amount of time I spend typing naturally decreases. Now, however, I've gotten my teeth into this, and I'm staying up late and waking up early to work on it, and about yesterday morning I started having to ice my wrists. WOO. lol But you may observe that I have prevailed regardless.

Today is my day off from work, so I will definitely be working on Chapter Six, but for now, Dearest Reader, I am going to go take some Advil. :)

* * *

A blood-red 1965 GTO cruised down the highway, engine purring, mufflers growling. It made people's heads turn, it made them grin and wave, and Jordan would have been on cloud nine about all of this, if it weren't for the fact that she was in the backseat, and had been for the entire trip.

"It's _my_ car," she said again, for the hundredth time.

"I don't care whose car it is," Dean shot back, almost verbatim what he'd said to her earlier. "When we're on a job, _I_ drive."

"Sometimes me," put in Sam.

"And sometimes him."

"But not me?" demanded Jordan. "How come Sam gets to drive and not me?"

Dean grinned at her in the rearview mirror. "Because you a rookie, kid."

Just to wipe that smartass grin off his face, Jordan kicked his seat, nearly sending him into the steering wheel. He shouted something at her—it sounded like "ahellefuckinheywhat" but it could have been anything—and Jordan didn't take kindly to that, either, so she stuck a hand up front and ruffled up his hair. Dean's hair did its thing mostly on its own, but if he didn't brush it just so, it was liable to go in funny directions. Jordan's handiwork had persuaded it into a truly remarkable shape, and so while Sam howled with laughter Dean had to pull the GTO over, and try to fix his hair.

"Don't be such a girl, Dean," Jordan said, sitting back in her seat. Her revenge was complete.

"How the hell am I supposed to get spontaneously laid if you do shit like that?" Dean demanded of her, to which Jordan responded, "Oh, does that happen often? Because last I checked, you haven't been with a girl _once_ the whole time I've been here."

"Ouch," murmured Sam, and looked at Dean expectantly, like a kid on the Fourth of July awaiting the fireworks.

"How _exactly_ do I bring a girl back to the hotel room?" Dean snapped. " 'Oh, yeah, let's go to my place, no biggie if there's a chick there' –"

"You've never a convinced a girl that her place would be better before?"

"Christ," said Dean, and slammed his foot on the gas. The GTO roared forward.

"After we do this job?" Jordan said. "Grumpy Pants gets laid."

There was a pause.

"But not by me." Jordan glanced quickly between the boys, noting the badly-hidden relief on their faces, and added, "We will stake out a bar all _night_ if we have to. Okay?"

"What about Sam?" Dean asked. "Are we going to reel him in a girl too?"

"Sammy-kins can wait. It's you we need to fix, Papa Bear."

Dean rolled his eyes heavenward, and said again: "_Christ_."

* * *

The three of them stood, shoulder-to-shoulder—or, at least, Dean and Jordan stood shoulder-to-shoulder, and Sam was on the end rocking the arm-to-shoulder—facing the hotel room wall, which they'd cleared of crappy pastel artwork in order to accommodate what Jordan referred to as their "crazy wall." ("It's not a crazy wall, it's research," said Dean, offended, to which Jordan replied, "All crazies have a crazy wall, darlin', and you are the craziest S.O.B. I have ever laid eyes on.")

"Let me see if I've got this," said Jordan. "Five victims over the last three years, all of them women. They all died of strangulation and mutilation. And this says supernatural to you _why_? Last I checked, human serial killers can strangle and mutilate too."

"Mutilation is a kind word for what happened," said Sam. "They weren't mutilated so much as their eyeballs exploded."

"Thanks for the mental imagery, Sam."

"What Sam _means_," Dean butted in, "is that we've seen this kind of eyeball-meltdown before."

"Sure, I've seen it too," said Jordan, and when they both looked at her, she added, "Indiana Jones, hello?"

Instead of scoffing, Sam said, "_Exactly_."

"Wait, what?"

"I mean it," said Sam. "Exactly like that. The people say the glory of God contained within the ark, and they melted. This is the same sort of principle, but on a slightly smaller scale. These women saw an angel—and angel's _true_ form, I mean—and it made their eyeballs explode."

Jordan's expression was one of horror. "Wait, wait, wait. How come I didn't get my eyes melted when I saw Cas?"

"Because Cas was wearing a meat suit," said Dean patiently.

"_Meat_ suit? _Meat_ suit? You mean he was _possessing_ someone? Like a demon?"

"Well, yeah," said Sam. "Are you okay?"

"I'm—uh—I'm fine. Just … creeped out, a bit."

Dean's eyebrows twitched upward. "You think _angels_ are creepy—but vampires you like?"

"Hey, okay," Jordan said defensively, "vampires are supposed to be creepy-ass bottom feeders. But angels are supposed to be—you know—glowing creatures of peace and love, and all that."

Dean snickered. "Yeah, right."

"We should probably call Cas," Sam said. "He might be able to tell us where the angel is at."

Jordan's eyes squinted tightly. "So you can _kill_ an angel?"

"Oh, good point," said Dean. "Killing angels is Castiel's specialty, not ours."

"For the love of—" began Jordan, beginning to be truly offended at this point. Angels had wings, angels were good, angels sang songs on harps and wore togas—

"You rang?" Castiel's voice said.

—or they had fabulous hands, which didn't even technically belong to them. "I think I'm going to be sick," Jordan said, looking at Castiel.

"I think we have a rogue angel here, Cas," Dean said, basically ignoring Jordan. Sam took the cue and sat her down on one of the hotel beds. "Unless Heaven ordered the strangulation and blinding of five women?"

"Not that I am aware of," said Castiel, which was so much worse. His face kept its expression, as if what Dean had said did not faze him—like he did not even care. Jordan pushed away Sam's hands and went over to Castiel, standing right in front of him so he had to look at her. His head moved ever so slightly to the side, betraying a curiosity that never made it to his face.

Because it wasn't his face, she thought.

Very slowly, Jordan reached up and put one hand on either side of his face, and squeezed until his face puckered. "Do you feel that?" she asked.

"Of course," said Castiel, though it sounded more like "a'coss" with his lips smooched together. She let his face go and put a hand against his heart instead, where she felt, steady and strong, a heartbeat.

"Is that _your_ heart?" Jordan demanded, and understanding flickered in his eyes.

"That is the heart of this body," Castiel told her. "I myself do not have a heart, as you mean it."

"You mean you're heartless?"

Castiel's head turned slightly as he considered what she had said. She'd meant it as it sounded—cruel, emotionless, empty—and he knew that, she saw. Finally he said, "When we first descend to Earth, we feel, but not as you feel. I will not say emotionless, because our emotions are emotions you could only understand within the realm of Heaven." He paused. "What you mean—human emotion—that comes later, and is looked down upon. It is like … an STD. Something that could have been avoided."

"Have you caught it, Cas?" Jordan said nastily. "Have you been infected by our petty human emotions?"

At least monsters were monsters. They weren't pretending to be anything else—like her friend. Everything that came before, that was all pretending, if Cas didn't feel anything.

"Indubitably," Castiel said, instead, and pointed at Dean. "I have spent far longer with _him_ than is healthy. You might say I am the laughing stock of Heaven."

"Except for the part where you kick some serious ass, am I right?" Dean put in, grinning at Castiel, who crinkled his eyes slightly in what might have been a smile in return.

Castiel looked back to Jordan. "I understand that you dislike this—method. The alternative, I am afraid, would kill you."

"Like the women died."

"Yes."

"Is there _anything_ good about angels?"

Dean was opening his mouth to tell her to knock it off—she could see him wanting to protect his friend and ally—but Castiel had reached up, and touched her forehead. The hotel room disappeared, sinking into gentle pale light that tingled wherever it touched her skin.

"Would you like to hear my true voice?" Castiel's voice asked, though she could not see him. "It is possible that you will hear nothing, and I will have given you a headache for nothing."

"Worth a try," Jordan breathed, still full of wonder at the place she was in, as if every molecule of the air were glowing.

_Angels are not creatures of fairy tale_, another voice said, crushing down upon her. It was Castiel's voice, with the same rocky quality and the same cadence, but it was also so much more. _We are soldiers, created to protect, defend, and, if necessary, cleanse the Earth. We do the bidding of our Father. I do not recall your Bible ever saying that we must be as you say. The Word has told you how we are. You knew it before you ever met me. _

He was right. "They saw the angel, and were terrified—"

_They were not terrified of our supreme cuteness_.

"But your body—_the_ body—"

_I asked and he accepted._

Oh. Oh. Christ, thought Jordan, and then hastily amended it to "geeze." She'd been ready to have a throw down with an _angel_ because he'd been wearing a body that he'd asked nicely for. Her stomach was still having trouble with that particular idea—asking nicely for a body—but this time, her head disagreed.

"Why are you telling me all this?" Jordan asked.

_You believe in Him,_ Castiel said. Every word he spoke made her eyes water. _That is a rarer quality than you know, especially among those who keep company with the Winchesters. And—_he paused. _I like you very much. I do not want you to hate me_.

The hotel room came back, all at once, and Jordan dropped like a stone, but Castiel was there to catch her. He waited for her to reclaim her balance, staying perfectly still. Jordan reached up and ruffled his hair, startling him badly, and grinned. "I was right the first time. You _are _a sweetheart, Cas."

"I am glad to hear you say so," Castiel said, and brought her upright. He spoke to all of them, though he looked only at her. "I will go speak to this angel, and if need be, I will execute them."

"You'll need back up," said Dean, who looked as if he was wishing Castiel had never heard them. Jordan thought it was the teensiest bit petty of him—hadn't he said that killing angels wasn't their thing?

"No, I won't," said Castiel. "Besides, I only have one blade."

Ah. Mystery solved. The Winchesters _could_ kill angels—with the right tools.

"Good luck," said Jordan, and Castiel vanished even as he nodded.

* * *

Castiel didn't come back, and didn't come back, and then he _really_ didn't come back, and they were all going a little nuts. Dean had taken to pacing the hotel room, back and forth, back and forth, and Sam was staring out the window like Castiel was going to walk up. Jordan had flattened herself out on one of the beds and had an arm thrown over her eyes so she couldn't see Dean pacing anymore.

They would have gone after him, but they didn't know where he'd gone. They were all kicking themselves for not asking, too, because now they had no way to know whether or not he was all right. ("I don't even know if he knows how to charge his cell phone," said Dean, to which Jordan replied, "An angel has a cell phone?") The clock worked its way around from two o'clock to eight o'clock, and Jordan's patience snapped.

"That's it," she said, coming to feet all at once. The boys looked at her in surprise. "No more waiting. We're going to do something productive."

"Like—" began Dean, thinking of driving all over town looking for bodies.

"Like that bar I saw down the street," said Jordan and flung open the door. "Out. Now."

"What if Castiel comes back?" Sam asked, still glued to his seat.

"He's an angel, isn't he? I'm _sure_ he can figure out where we are. Now move out before I move it for you, chumps."

Heads down, with guilty glances back at the empty room, the boys left the hotel room. Jordan shut the door after them with a snap and led them, head high and pony tail swinging, to the bar. "Now listen to me," she said to them, as they went inside. "Our mission is not to get Dean laid tonight. What if Castiel appeared in the middle of that?"

Dean's eye twitched.

"Exactly," said Jordan. "Our mission is to collect people."

Sam squinted at her. "You're going to have to run that by me again."

"It's a game I play with my friends. Whoever leaves the bar with the most phone numbers—or a comparable verbal request—wins."

"Oh, dude, I will so own this," said Dean, suddenly very enthusiastic. "That chick over there, she is _all_—"

"Nope," said Jordan, and pushed him down onto a chair. "That's not how it works. _They_ come to _you_. Don't give me that look, it's not a girl thing. I play this with my guy friends too. It's all about silent attraction."

"This is so stupid," Sam said. "We should be out looking for Cas."

"And if he's dead? What are we going to find?" They didn't answer her. "Just don't think about it for five seconds, okay? Order a drink and relax."

* * *

Relaxing wasn't something the Winchesters actually did, so they played her game, and by the time eleven had rolled around, the score was Dean, 5, Sam, 4, and Jordan, 8, and they still hadn't seen hide nor hair of Castiel. But the game was as distracting as Jordan had hoped it would be, and the boys were now bound and determined to beat her score.

"Oh, look, look," whispered Dean. "You see that chick over there? The really hot one in red? She is _so_ checking me out."

"God, you're right!" Jordan whispered back. "She is sexing you with her eyes, boy."

Dean looked at her narrowly. "Was that _sarcasm_?"

"Yes." Jordan waggled her eyebrows at him. "That chick is looking at _me_."

"Is not."

"Is so."

"Is _not_!"

"Children," said Sam, as the woman in red slid to her feet. Dean and Jordan fell silent, watching her move, and stayed silent right up until the moment the woman leaned over the table, bright red lips twisted into a smile, and said to Jordan, "Can I buy you a drink, sweetheart?"

"Oh _come on_!" Dean yelled, scaring the hell out of the woman, who beat a hasty retreat back to her corner. "That makes nine! How can you have _nine_?"

"Well, look at her," said Sam, as if this should be obvious.

"Yeah, look at me," Jordan said, scathingly, and kicked Sam in the shin. He winced. "What the hell does that mean, Winchester? Oh, god, _Cas_." Jordan jumped out of her seat and ran for the doors, where through the plate glass, a staggering Castiel was just visible. This time, Jordan caught Castiel, instead of the other way around.

"Jesus, Cas," Jordan murmured, slipping one of his arms around her shoulders. His head hung down, and she could see blood on his lips. "Didn't go so well, huh?"

"In a manner of speaking," said Castiel, and coughed a wad of blood onto the pavement.

Jordan looked up at Sam and Dean with eyes just a little panicked. "Help me get him to the hotel."

* * *

Jordan sat out on the curb, legs splayed out, her chin pillowed in her fists, and watched the hookers on the corner. One of them looked like an oversexed Rainbow Brite, and she kept running after cars like maybe her lunatic screams would convince them that she really was a better sell than her contemporary, who looked like a drugged-up Winona Ryder, circa the eighties. The hookers were the best entertainment to be had. Jordan didn't smoke and she sure as hell wasn't going back inside, not even to watch HBO.

Her hands were still shaking, so she stuck them down in her pockets, but the position she was in now relied entirely on her abs, which, let's face it, weren't in the greatest of shape. With a quiet sigh of defeat Jordan laid out flat on the sidewalk, hands still buried deep in her pockets, so that if she rolled her eyes just so she could see the top edge of their hotel room door.

Probably there was gum and spit and blood on that sidewalk. _Oh fucking well_, thought Jordan, and closed her eyes. She could hear Rainbow Brite bellowing at passing cars, the hum of the hotel's ice machine, and, in the distance, the world-weary sound of a passing train laying on its horn.

Jordan thought this was a disgusting town.

The hotel room door creaked open, and beside her a pair of boots appeared. They could have belonged to either brother, except that they were huge, and therefore belonged to Sam. He took a seat beside her, and there was blood on his hands. She shut her eyes again.

"He'll be all right," Sam said to the front bumper of a nearby Ford. When the Ford made no reply, he turned his head to Jordan and added, "He's made of tough stuff."

They'd barely made it to the hotel room before they realized that Castiel was bleeding out on them, his body broken and riddled with wounds, the worst of which was across his belly. Jordan had helped them strip off the bloody clothes and held Castiel's hand while they started the long process of cleaning him up, but it hadn't gone on for longer than a few minutes before she had to get up and leave.

It wasn't just that there were so many holes. It was that she was afraid that there were so many that Castiel—the real Castiel—might leak out of them, and that sort of leak, she was pretty sure, you couldn't sew up.

"He asked for you," Sam continued. "He asked if you would pray for him."

It was dumb to think Sam didn't see the tears that leaked out the corners of her eyes at that one. She wasn't turning out to be such a tough hunter after all. No one would scoff at her killing skills, she didn't think, but seeing Castiel down and out like that—

_Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven_…

"And Dean says he needs help getting Castiel into the GTO. We can't stay here. Apparently, Castiel's brawl made a little noise, and the police are bound to notice bloody sheets."

…_Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever—so I'll know who to blame if that angel in there dies, you got that? Amen._

"Jordan?"

She opened her eyes, looking at the light-polluted sky. No stars. No heavens. "Yeah." She got to her feet and dusted off the bottom of her jeans, which were, sure enough, far dirtier than they should have been for sitting on a sidewalk. She paused, looking down at Sam's head. "Sam?"

He turned his head so he could look up at her, allowing the light from the street lamps to catch along his jaw and cheekbones. He looked like more of an angel than Castiel did, in this light. "If we had gone in there, instead of Castiel, would we have lived?"

"Maybe," he said, to be optimistic. Then he shrugged. "Probably not. No. Dean might make it out alive—he's pretty good at kicking Heaven's ass, actually—but I wouldn't put money on us."

"And Castiel's going to be okay, right?"

Sam smiled and took one her hands, freshly freed from their blue jean prison. "Cas is a soldier, Jory," he told her. "He's lived through far worse than this."

Her fingers squeezed down around his so tight he winced. "You promise?"

"Yeah, I promise."

Jordan took a steadying breath, looking now at the hotel room door instead of Sam, and slowly straightened out her spine. From somewhere deep she pulled up the Jordan that had been gung ho for anything and everything hunter, or at least a semblance of that Jordan, and went inside the hotel room wearing a cocky smile.

"Nurse Jordan, at your service," she said, voice ringing boldly out. "And no, this isn't the beginnings of a porno."

The door shut behind her with a slam.


	6. Exposé

A Dean-less chapter :( Also an Impala-less chapter. You have no idea how hard it was to write. THEY ARE MY FAVORITES, OKAY. Unfortunately, I also really, really wanted to give Jordan a chance to step up a little in the job department. Going on a hunt with the Winchesters for back up is kind of like saying you're going swimming with floaties on. And the rest is - well. Let's call it plot development :)

Also: Thanks for all the comments! You guys rock.

* * *

Jordan Delaine awoke with a jerk from her nightmare, every muscle in her body simultaneously tensing. She shouldn't have woken so soon, she knew; her nightmares usually ended when everyone was dead, but ever since they'd nearly gotten Castiel killed a few weeks ago, he'd been included too, and her nightmare lasted far past dawn. At first the sound of her gasping breaths disguised it, but then someone laid pedal to metal, and the tell-tale roar of the Impala's 327 Turbo Fire V8 lit into the night. Her first thought was, _hell yeah_, quickly followed by, _why am I not in the car?_

In a second she was out of the bed and running to the window, just in time to see the back taillights of the Impala winking into the night. They'd left without her. Those _jerks_ had left without her! Jordan bolted down the stairs and out into the night, a full list of obscenities already in mind, but before she had gotten two steps out the door, she realized that Bobby and Sam were standing out in the yard, watching the Impala go.

Bobby and _Sam_. Not just Bobby. Only Dean had left. Jordan let out a sigh of relief, catching Sam and Bobby's attention, which was right around the time that Jordan realized she was still in her pajamas—or what passed for pajamas during the summer heat. Underwear and a bra had seemed like a good idea when she was lying on top of the sheets, sweating like a pig, but standing out on the porch in front of Sam and Bobby, she found her enthusiasm waning.

"Oh God," Jordan said, and ran back into the house with the image of their surprised faces burned into her retinas.

* * *

This time wearing shorts and a T-shirt, Jordan descended back downstairs. Sam was drinking orange juice at the table and looking pensive.

"Penny for your thoughts, big boy," said Jordan, taking the seat across from him. "But if your answer is 'why polka dots' then you can go straight to hell."

Sam grinned at her. "Okay. Why _pink_ polka dots?"

Jordan threw a salt shaker at his head, but he caught it, which sort of ruined it. Sam leaned forward, his eyes glittering, and said with an inviting bob of his eyebrows, "While Dean's away—"

"—Sammy will play?" Jordan guessed.

"Close. I'm pretty sure there's a job in Illinois, but Dean left before I could tell him."

"Where _is_ Dean?"

"Helping a friend." Sam tugged at a lock of her hair impatiently. "_Listen_. There's a job in Illinois, and it's not the kind that we can just let go. We should go."

Jordan lips twitched at the corners. "We—as in you and me?"

Sam nodded, and Jordan's arms rocketed upward in the universal "goal!" sign, her wild whoop sending the birds outside shrieking for the sky. Sam laughed at her, but she didn't care. She leapt out of her chair and gave a graceful turn on her tippy-toes. When she came to a stop, she leveled a finger in Sam's direction. "This is going to be _awesome_. You want to know why?"

"Why?" Sam asked obligingly.

"Because this means I only have to split the credit one way!" Jordan pumped her arms and ducked her head like she was boxing. "Imma gonna build me some street cred! Before you know it, I'll be going _pro_, baby!"

"You are the only person I know who gets this excited about a job," Sam told her, unable to do anything but smile at her antics. "Unless it's Dean and there's hookers involved."

She stilled. "There's hookers involved? Like—helpless dancing firemen and policemen?"

Sam squinted at her. "No. I was just—"

"Oh, thank God!" Jordan collapsed back into her seat, a hand over her heart. "You scared me half to death! The world would be a terrible, terrible place without dancing firemen, you know that, right?"

He just shook his head. "Sometimes you and Dean are scary alike."

"Thanks. I think. When do we leave?"

Sam sent her a mischievous smile. "Is today too soon?"

"I love you, baby," Jordan said rapturously, and dropped a kiss on his forehead before running back upstairs to pack. Once upon a time, she'd acted this way about prom, but if you were to ask her now what she'd rather be doing—curling her hair into ringlets or stuffing her flip-blade into her jeans pocket—she wouldn't even have had to think about it. On one hand: ringlets, taffeta, and scrawny, pimply boys. On the other: fast cars, guns, and Sam Winchester.

It wasn't even a fair contest.

* * *

Oak Glen, Illinois, was a quiet suburb an hour's drive from Peoria, making it the perfect nesting grounds for Peoria's rich and richer who craved a dose of nature. And maybe, once upon a time, Oak Glen _had_ had nature, but the Oak Glen Sam and Jordan drove through now was manicured lawns, imported trees, and man-made ponds.

The hotels alone were going to cost them an arm and a leg, so they took up residence in an empty house across town, one of fifty in a new suburb that had yet to be sold. Jordan had at first been appalled by the idea of squatting in the house, but once she discovered the white marble counters and mahogany cupboards, she was in love.

"Okay," Sam said, standing in front of what had become their crazy wall. It was the only wall Jordan had let him use ("This paint job is flawless! I can't believe you'd want to put holes in it!"), and it was in the garage, which meant that it was muggy as hell. "This is what we know. At least three people have died in the last year, for apparently no reason. I've looked at this backwards and forwards, though, and besides a comparable income, I can't see anything connecting them."

"They all live in the same neighborhood," Jordan said.

"I think we should go talk to their families." Sam turned to look at her. "Do you have a suit, by any chance?"

Jordan had witnessed the brothers' charade, and so knew what he meant, but instead she brought a little pamphlet level with his eyes. It read "Sunny Acres" in big letters, and below it, "Fun Activities For All Ages!" She flipped it smartly open and pointed at the inside page. Under the "Twenty- to Thirty-Somethings" heading, there was an entry for a couples-only book club.

"Community outreach?" Sam said, staring quizzically down. "You think they all went to the same book club?"

"I think there's a good chance, yeah," said Jordan. "And if not, I bet ten-to-one they have all the best gossip."

Sam pursed his lips. "Not bad. Not bad at all."

* * *

The book club was held every two weeks at a house a ten minute's walk from the house they were squatting at. Lest anyone see them walking to and from the unsold section, they took the GTO for a spin around the corner, and came at the house from the more crowded direction. That was Sam's idea.

The clothes, on the other hand, were Jordan's.

If they were going to be impersonating a young wealthy couple, she reasoned, they couldn't be wearing plaid. She might—_might_—be able to pull it off, but Sam, with his steel-toed boots, could not, no matter how pretty his face was. So she took them shopping, and blew the credit limit of one his cards. They couldn't pull this job off without good information, and they couldn't get _that_ without fitting in—Dean would shit a brick when he found out. If he found out. Jordan could handle him, though.

She dressed Sam in Guess jeans with the barest hint of an acid wash and a black Armani shirt that was the upscale version of his usual attire. His shoes drained an entire credit card—Ferragamo moccasins, and not even on sale—but by the time she was done with him, Sam was the picture of young wealth.

For herself, she kept it simple: a dark red wrap top, belted, with the skinny jeans she'd worn the first day she'd met the boys (she was pro-recycling), and brown Leombruni ballet flats. Simple, however, did not equal cheap—it was the shoes again—and by the end of their shopping trip, Sam had to throw away two of his credit cards.

It was expensive, and Sam had gotten into the habit of frowning whenever he looked at his shoes, but Jordan matched her car, and when they pulled up to the house they looked fabulous. There was a couple ahead of them who had just parked, and they turned to watch the GTO with raised eyebrows. Their expressions relaxed into warm smiles when they saw Jordan and Sam emerge, and Sam shot Jordan a glance.

"Told you," said Jordan, in a low whisper. If they'd gotten out wearing plaid, those expressions would have been wary and distrustful. She locked the GTO and gave the other couple a broad smile. "Hello!"

"Hi!" the woman said in response, coming forward with her hand extended. Her eyes were a clear grey that shown even in the fading light. "I'm Molly. We're new here, so—"

"Really!" exclaimed Jordan. "Us too! Oh, I'm so relieved. Sam—" She reached out until her hand found his, and she tugged him closer. "—they're new too! I was so worried we'd stick out like a sore thumb."

Molly's smile was genuine. "Tom wanted to stay home for the same reason."

Behind them, a car door slammed, and they all turned to look at the other couple just arriving. Jordan gave them a once-over, and was pleased to see their outfits were just as thought out as hers, if slightly less expensive. The man smiled at them, showing all his teeth, and beside her she felt Sam tense up.

"Good evening!" the man said. "I'm James. I take it you're all newcomers?"

"That's us," said Jordan, cheerfully. She put an arm around Sam's middle. Usually, this wasn't the sort of thing she could comfortably do—she was too tall—but with Sam, she fit perfectly, and she knew it would help cement their image as a couple.

"Follow us in," the woman beside James said. "Meredith will be so pleased to see you all. She's been talking for ages about getting some new blood."

Sam and Jordan exchanged a look. "I figured a book club like this would be pretty popular," said Sam, affecting a look of mild surprise.

"It is," said James. He pulled his lips down over his teeth, like he was trying to frown, but something—maybe botox—didn't let him. "Unfortunately, we lost a few members. It was very sad. Please, come inside."

"Creepy!" Jordan overheard Molly saying to her husband, and was glad she wasn't the only one who thought so. She was getting major league bad vibes from James, and his wife, too. She tucked her hand into Sam's pocket and walked that way into the house, where they found the rest of the book club: four couples, not including James and his wife, all of whom had the same plastic good humor as they rose to greet the newbies.

There was Meredith and Louis, both redheads, and it seemed that they ran the show; the book club was held at their house, in any case, and it was Meredith who picked out the books.

Julie and Mark were the oldest couple in the room, closing in on the forty cut off, if Jordan's guess was accurate. They had the sort of faces that no one ever remembered, but Jordan would never forget the princess-cut diamond on Julie's finger. It was easily the biggest rock Jordan had even seen—or even imagined!—could be set on a ring.

Horatio and Jim were the third couple, both mid-twenties and in love, though not so in love that they didn't give Sam a quick once-over as he came in. Horatio was dark and had all sharp edges, unlike Jim, who was pale and round. They sat next to Meredith and talked almost exclusively to her.

The last couple was also the youngest, Michaela and Roland, both extremely beautiful and wealthy, though neither could provide a concrete answer to the question "what do you do for a living?"

"Oh, this is splendid," said Jim, in a bright drawl that spoke of upstate New York. "Fresh meat. After those horrible accidents, we've been absolutely depleted. Right, darling?"

Horatio didn't look as if he liked being called "darling" in public, but he bore it well. "Depleted," he agreed. "It's been markedly less fun."

Meredith shot them a look that shut them both up, but the damage was done, because it gave Jordan an opening to gasp theatrically, "Accidents? You don't mean those poor people who died were in _this_ book club!"

"I heard about those from the realtor!" Molly broke in, her brilliant grey eyes wide. "Three people, right?"

Jordan bobbed her head enthusiastically, her eyes still on Meredith, who, realizing she was cornered, let out a loud—and obviously fake—sigh. "So you've heard," she said, sounding as if she were on the brink of tears. "I can't think what it means. We must be cursed!"

"Now, now," said Louis, giving his wife's shoulder a comforting pat. He gave them all a stern look. "This has been very hard on all of us, I'm afraid."

"Oh," said Jordan. "Oh, I'm sure."

* * *

"They _so _did it!" Jordan cried, back at the house. Sam was slipping off his shoes as if he were afraid they might fall apart under his fingers. "Did you see that act Meredith put on? Guilty as hell, that's them."

"I happen to agree," said Sam, setting one shoe gingerly to the side before beginning on the other, "but we still don't know _how_ they did it."

"Huh," said Jordan, not a denial, but still disappointed. He was right; they might know who was to blame, but they couldn't do a thing about it until they knew the why and how. "How are we going to do that? No offense, but if we can't even tell how they were killed—"

"—then it narrows the list a bit." Sam, finished (finally) with his shoes, went in to where they'd stashed their bags and dragged out a notebook. It was one Jordan had seen glimpses of, but never looked through, and never asked to look through, either, because it meant something powerful to the boys. He began flipping through it, one page after another. "There aren't a lot of things that can kill a person without making a mark."

"Poison?"

"Poison's a human thing," said Sam. "The M.E. would have noticed poison."

Jordan crouched down beside him, looking down at the handwritten pages. He was going through them too fast to be reading them all the way down; he'd obviously read this notebook before, and more than once. Sometimes there were pictures, sometimes maps, sometimes just blocks of text that were squeezed across pages originally meant for a day planner.

"What are you thinking?" she asked.

"I'm thinking—I'm thinking that if it weren't for James, I'd be betting on witches. It's not unheard of for men to enroll in the girl's club, but so many? Not to mention witch covens—_real_ witch covens, not Wicca covens—don't tend to top more than five members. They don't like sharing. You see where I'm going with this?"

"Sam, honey," Jordan said, meeting his eyes when he looked up at her, "I don't see diddlysquat. We've been through this before, right? I'm good with the guns, I'm good with the car, but my knowledge stands _this_ high." She lifted up her fingers to show him the inch of space between her pointer finger and thumb.

Sam grinned. "I keep forgetting you're new at this. All right, then, crash course in witches: they work in blood and oaths. Their power comes from demons, but making it work is where the blood comes in. But if they're not witches—"

"You think it's all the blood but none of the demons?"

"No, I think it _could_ be blood rites. It could also be gods, or a wishing well, or angels, or—"

"Or a lot of things," said Jordan. "I get it."

Sam shut the notebook with a snap and set it back in his bag, tucked safely between two of his favorite shirts. He hesitated, then said, "If anything happens, you have to make sure the journal gets back to Dean, okay?"

Oh. _Journal_. Not a notebook—a distinction that meant it wasn't just the information inside, but who had written it, that was important.

"Sure," said Jordan.

"I wouldn't even have it right now, but Dean didn't want to take it with him. The place he went, there's people who'd like to steal it." Sam's face tightened into a frown. "I should have left it with Bobby."

Jordan reached out and set a hand on Sam's head, entangling her fingers in his smooth brown hair. He looked up at her, and just for a split second, he looked like a little kid. "Nothing's going to happen to the journal," she told him. "I know you guys can't dial 1-800-Angels, but I can, and I'll get Cas to take it away if I have to. All right?"

He nodded.

"Now come on, sourpuss." She ruffled his hair.

"Come where?"

Jordan grinned at him. "I'm gonna let that one slide. Get your pretty ass outside and you'll see where, won't you?"

* * *

They didn't actually go far, just up the road a ways to a hill Jordan had spotted when they were coming in. She parked the GTO as far from the tree line as she could, with the hood pointed towards the drop off. They got up on the hood and sprawled out with their heads resting on the windshield.

"This is so bad for the paint job," Jordan said, and then laughed, because she didn't care. Sam turned his head and grinned at her. She could see his lips move as if he was going to lay something witty on her—though one-liners were really more Dean's thing than Sam's—but whatever it was, it never made it. His mouth closed and she waited, but he just stayed there, looking at her.

She'd done this once before in her life—that is, she'd done this before with another person. Starlit nights on the hood of a car were her way to unwind. No matter how big the problem was, it was never bigger than the sky above her.

_How big is that ouchy, Jory?_

_Huge, daddy!_

_Can it fill up the sky?_

_Course not, daddy._

_Then it ain't worth complaining about._

"Can I ask you something?" Sam asked.

"Shoot."

"This smartass tough-girl thing you do—it's an act, right?" Jordan felt her lips curve up, and the beginnings of a laugh burbled in her throat before she clamped down on her molars and swallowed it. That was Jordan's catch-all response to all things: laugh. Laugh long and hard until she didn't feel like crying anymore. That was another thing her dad had taught her before he died.

"The reason I ask is—no offense—but sometimes you seem like Superwoman, and other times, it's like you're falling apart. I've asked Dean and he just thinks you're perfect. Am I crazy?"

"Anyone ever tell you that you ask too many questions?" Jordan asked, instead of answering him. It wouldn't deter him for long. Sam wasn't annoying like Audrey could be, but they had the same sort of rabid curiosity that never let well enough alone, not for anything.

"Dean never lets a day go by," he replied, and she could almost feel him smiling. "I'm serious, Jory. Are you okay? I mean, _really_ okay? Because I think that thing with Castiel shook you up more than you're letting on—"

Jordan reached up and covered her ears. It was a reflex, from when she was little and her parents would fight, when they were still alive to fight. After a second she let her hands drop. "Christ, but you're pushy."

"I just think—"

"Yeah, yeah. That I'm broken. So what if I am?" Jordan shrugged against the GTO's smooth red hide. "My parents are dead, Sam, and not of old age. I'm pretty sure you can imagine what kind of effect that might have on a kid."

He winced a little, and Jordan wasn't sorry for it. She'd taken him up here so that they could relax and have a private minute just the two of them, not so that he could grill her. But a lot of what was driving him, she knew, was worry, so she headed off his impending questions by saying, "I don't like people dying on me, that's all."

"It happens in this line of work," Sam said, as if she needed reminding.

Jordan's mouth drew into a hard line. "So I've noticed."

"But I was right? Cas did bother you?"

Jordan sat up suddenly, and when she turned to look at him, it wasn't the Jordan he was used to seeing. There was no smile on her lips and no joke in her eyes. It wasn't much of a difference, if you tallied it up, but it changed everything. "You know damn well that I have nightmares, Sam Winchester. We've shared the same room one too many times not for you to know. And you also know, therefore, that I've been having nightmares for longer than this hunting thing. So what does this mean, professor? Better yet, why do you _care_?"

"I care because I care about _you_," said Sam, which was precisely what she'd expected him to say. He'd sat up, too, but he'd had to scoot down the hood a little to manage it, trying to get his big frame in a comfortable position. It meant that he was looking up at her, just a little. Jordan had a brief moment of vertigo before scooting down with him. "I know I'm pushing your buttons. But if I find out—maybe I can help."

"Tell me about Stanford," Jordan snapped, "and maybe it'll help."

This time he didn't wince, he flinched, but Jordan wasn't done. "Tell me why you're treating some old journal like's it gold. Or you could tell me how exactly you're buddies with an angel. I've been thinking about that thing you said, where Dean would survive a heavenly throw down but you wouldn't—you didn't mean that he was a better fighter than you, did you? Because I've seen you fight, and you're just as good as he is." Jordan stared him down, eyes burning in the darkness. "I'm not the only one with secrets, Sam."

Sam didn't back down, didn't look away. She'd half-expected him to tell her to get lost, but instead he said, "And if I tell you everything?"

"_Why_?" demanded Jordan. "Why would you want to tell me anything at all? If this is your idea of therapy, Winchester—"

Though he must have known it would cost him later, Sam reached out and put a hand over her mouth. "First of all, because I want to," he said. "Second of all—you remember the vampires?"

Jordan nodded, seeing as how she couldn't talk. The jerk.

"We said you were family, but you don't even know about dad's journal. It's been eating at me ever since. How can we say that and leave you in the dark? Better yet, how can I say you're family, and listen to you cry every night?"

Jordan twisted away from his hand and said, "I do _not_ cry!"

"You do," Sam said, dropping his hand. "In your sleep. We hear you."

"This is such bullshit," Jordan said, refusing to look at him, but she wasn't exactly walking away. She hadn't even gotten down off the hood of the GTO.

"I'm going to tell you everything," Sam said, "and I want you to listen. No interruptions."

"No interruptions, got it."

He was cracked in the head if he honestly thought she could keep her mouth shut that long.


	7. Jordan Interruptus

I am on FIRE! :D I pounded this baby out in an hour. I had a craving for some good ol' fashioned monster killing. So it's a little light on the interpersonal stuff, but hey. :) I like it anyway. Enjoy!

* * *

"I feel ridiculous," said Jordan, failing to stifle a giggle. She was sitting on Sam's shoulders, her feet caught tightly in his hands, so that they could peer into Meredith and Louis's house. The problem was that it was nearly midnight, and it looked like the targets were asleep. The whole thing was beginning to seem ludicrous.

"There are too many cars out front," Sam said, sounding not in the least bothered by the weight of her on his shoulders. "We have to check it out."

"Yeah, yeah." She pressed her face a little closer to the glass, and while she scrutinized the shadowy interior, asked, "You comfy down there?"

"Fine," he said. "Except your butt smells like cheese."

Jordan looked down at him in shock, but he was grinning. "You're as bad as Dean," she told him, and gave his face a playful swat. He jerked away, causing Jordan to sway precariously atop her perch—sway just enough, in fact, to see that there was light coming out from under one of the doors. If she remembered correctly, it was the door to the basement.

"Down," she whispered, and he immediately crouched. She slipped down off his back and tip-toed over to the slender rectangle, partially hidden by grass (an inch too high here—Louis's gardener was slacking!) that served for the basement window. There was something painted over the window to keep light from escaping, but it wasn't locked; a gentle poke of her finger pried it open wide enough for them to see inside.

Jordan and Sam exchanged raised eyebrows. Jordan had put her money on death-by-ghost-breath, and Sam on soul-sucking. And even though they had briefly entertained the idea of blood, neither of them had imagined anything quite like this.

Meredith and Louis were down there, all right, along with Horatio and Jim, and they were all—as Jordan would later put it—"_seriously_ naked!" Meredith was lying prone on a table, while the men took turns cutting their palms and dribbling blood across her belly, chest, and face.

"_Please_ don't be an orgy," Jordan whispered, eyes squeezing shut. "_Please_ don't be an orgy, please, please, please—"

"Oh, _God_," said Sam, and she peeked just long enough to see the men licking the blood off Meredith's pale skin. Jordan had to clamp a hand over her mouth to keep from squeaking. They watched—or Sam watched; Jordan's eyes remained very firmly shut, thank you very much—before Sam finally lost his stomach for it, and let the window fall shut. They leaned together against the side of the house, aghast.

"Well," said Sam. "We know what they're doing, at least."

Jordan looked at him with wide eyes. "We do?"

"That's a prayer," he said, nodding towards the basement window. "More of a command, really. It's powerful stuff, very old—there's a lot they could do with magic like that."

"What I saw in there was _not_ magical," Jordan whispered furiously. "No wonder Horatio's such a tightwad, his pecker looks like it's been mummified!"

Sam snorted, unable to keep a smile off his face. "When you get married someday," he told her, "and your husband gets old—never, _ever_ tell him that he has a mummified pecker."

"Married?" Jordan repeated. "Who would have me?"

Before Sam could answer that, she got to her feet and hurried back around to the side of the house, where sure enough, Mark, Julie, Michaela, and Roland were climbing out of an unimpressive Ford Taurus. She knew she'd heard something ugly coming down the road. Jordan glanced back at Sam. "Looks like the rest of the gang is here. What to do you want to do?"

Sam hesitated, but only for a moment. "I have an idea."

* * *

The women—and Jim—were all screaming, howling really, and it made for a terrific cover as Jordan and Sam slipped downstairs, bearing with them an assortment of pistols, rifles, and hatchets for the dirty work later. In fact, the book club enthusiasts were all so busy with their blood—and, Jordan saw, other more complicated and really, truly _gag-worthy_ things—that they didn't notice Sam or Jordan at all until Sam cleared his throat.

"This is a really horrible twist on swinging, you know," Jordan said, as all activity froze.

"Hunters," said Meredith, spitting the word. Sam's sawed-off shotgun immediately swung around to point at her face. "You really think you can come here—onto _my_ ground—and take me on?"

"So you're not denying that you ganked three people," Jordan clarified, and Jim hissed at her, sending a fine spray of blood onto her Yankee's T-shirt. She looked down with a curled lip. "_Dude_. Say it, don't spray it."

"Just what do you imagine you're going to be doing here?" Louis asked of them. He got up from his place beside Meredith, probably to assert some authority and maybe intimidate them a little.

"Oh!" Jordan cried, gagging. "Oh, shoot it! Shoot it! I think it's moving on its own!"

Louis—and everyone else—glanced down.

"I think they have surgeries that can fix that now," Sam said helpfully, and Louis turned a mottled shade of purple that didn't bode well.

"Leave my house," Louis snarled, "or else."

Jordan's eyebrows shot up. "Oh, see, now I'm terrified. Look at me. White as a sheet, I bet. Can you see my knees quaking? Your threats, Louis, they're—they're so profound—"

"You _bitch_," said Meredith, so Jordan shot her in the face. There was a dead silence as everyone watched Meredith collapse backward and slide, inevitably, onto the cement floor. Then Louis broke from the pack and tried to strangle Jordan. She tried to shoot him, but missed—sort of. Louis screamed and dropped, blood pouring onto the floor.

"Whoops," said Jordan. "I was supposed to aim higher, right? Try, try again."

"This is murder!" Mark shrieked, hiding behind Julie.

"Murder is what you did to those three people," Sam replied. "Think of us as karma."

"Karma with guns," added Jordan. Sam shot Mark as Horatio rushed him, leaving Jordan to deal with Julie and Jim, who were pissed off and naked and looking at her with eyes that glowed red. Horatio threw Sam into a wall; Jordan got off a shot at Jim; Sam knifed Horatio in the heart; and Julie, the last one standing, let out an ungodly shriek before falling on Jordan.

They struggled together on the floor, rolling this way and that, the fight going basically nowhere because Julie's strategy was to hold on for dear life. She seemed to realize that this wasn't working and tried biting instead. Jordan yelled and reached out for anything—anything at all—her fingers caught on something and she hit Julie with it, and kept hitting until the other woman's teeth let go. It wasn't until Julie was dead that Jordan realized she'd beaten the other woman's head in with a flower pot.

"You okay?" asked Sam, bleeding from a cut on his forehead, but otherwise all right. He helped Jordan to her feet and winced at the blood smeared all over her T-shirt.

"Okay?" Jordan tugged down the neck of her shirt to show him the bloody bite mark. "I probably have HIV!"

"Doubtful," said Sam. "They weren't human anymore."

"Noticed that one, thanks." Jordan picked up her gun and started up the stairs. "The glowing eyes was my first clue."

Sam laughed.

* * *

It had been a while since Audrey got anything in the mail worth looking at—namely, half-naked photos of the Winchester boys. When she saw Jordan's handwriting across an envelope, she let out a squeal, startling old Mrs. Henry half to death, and ran all the way back to her apartment (three floors!) It wasn't until she was safely locked inside that she ripped open the envelope.

The photo, this time, did not include Dean, and it hadn't been taken at Bobby's house. Jordan had leapt into Sam's arms, waving a sheet of paper over her head, just as the picture was snapped. Sam was grinning up at her, and neither one seemed to care that the people walking in and out of the frame were giving them scandalized looks.

The note on the back read:

_HIV free! You'll be happy to know that pagan freaks aren't infectious :) That dumbass chick bit me for nothing. We're on our way back to Bobby's now to meet up with Dean. Love you! – J_

Short. _Really _short. Pagan freaks? HIV? Biting? Audrey set the photo on the counter with shaking hands. Jordan had a _lot_ of explaining to do—just as soon as Audrey could figure out how to get into contact with her.

* * *

Jordan must have read Audrey's mind, because a week later she got another envelope, this one of Sam and Jordan at a lake. Sam was shirtless and Jordan was down to her bra, both of them soaking wet. Jordan was sitting on Sam's lap, her arms around his neck, and they were smiling at the camera—nothing more, nothing less, but Audrey's heart all but stopped anyway.

_Hey, babe!_ Jordan's note on the back said. _We stopped at a lake to cool down, it's __so__ hot out! We had a total blast. There were some college kids out there having a party and they shared some beers with us. Definitely my idea of a good summer vacation! Also, don't worry about my last letter, I was joking around. The things we killed weren't human, the chance that they'd be infectious were practically nil. It wasn't till after I sent it that I thought how it might sound. Don't be pissed! Hugs and kisses!_

_Jordan_

_P.S. Stop smiling, we didn't do anything naughty in the lake :)_

* * *

Dean was waiting for them when they got back, sitting on Bobby's front porch with a beer dangling between his fingers like he wanted it to be a cigarette. He waited until they'd gotten their bags out of the GTO and were heading towards the house to speak.

"So how'd the job go?"

"Good," said Sam, halting in front his brother. Jordan had stopped a few paces back, watching Dean warily. "You?"

Dean swallowed a mouthful of beer. "Good."

It was like watching two fighters bow before a match, and it put a rock in Jordan's gut, even though she couldn't say for the life of her what they'd done wrong. Maybe it was about the journal.

"Out a little long, weren't you?" Dean asked. He set down the beer and stood up. She was sure it wasn't just her imagination that said Dean was preparing for a brawl, because Sam had tensed up, and all of his weight had gone to the balls of his feet.

"We stopped off at a lake after," Jordan said, shifting Dean's attention away from Sam. It was a bad idea. The look in his eyes put a stake of fear through her unlike anything she'd ever felt.

Sam dropped his bag with a thud, stepping neatly between Dean and Jordan. "Something wrong with that, Dean?"

"Something wrong with picking up a _phone_?" Dean retorted. "Bobby says you're on a job, but he can't tell me where. 'Maybe a week,' he says, and I'm waiting for _three_! You couldn't call me _once_ to say, 'Hey, Dean, no worries, we're good, we're fine, be back soon'?"

Jordan's fear evaporated, replaced with a blooming warm-fuzzy, and she came around Sam to give Dean a kiss on the cheek. "We love you too, Papa Bear," she said, and went inside. The boys watched her go, eyebrows raised.

Sam clapped his brother on his shoulder as he picked up his bag, and said with a snicker, "What she said."

"I'm still pissed!" Dean yelled after him, but Jordan, peeking out the window, saw a smile on his face that said otherwise.


	8. The Beginning of the End

This is the second-to-last chapter, my friends. I'm off to put the finishing touches on the ending, which will probably be posted in twenty or so minutes. In the meantime, enjoy!

* * *

"No, doofus, you turn it the other way," Dean said, and when Jordan kept turning anyway, grabbed her hand. She looked at him, startled. "The _other way,_" he repeated.

"Right, duh," said Jordan. She resumed twisting.

"Jordan?"

She paused. "Yeah?"

Dean very gently pried her fingers off. "That's the same direction you were going before, honey. What's gotten into you?"

Jordan sighed and relaxed back against the GTO's bumper, pushing back an errant wisp of hair and getting a line of grease across her forehead for her trouble. Dean bit back a smile and sat against the bumper too.

"I don't know," she said. "Sam told you about Oak Glen?"

"Which part?" Dean returned, grinning, but Jordan shot him a look that sobered him up fast. "Yeah, he told me. Is it giving you second thoughts?"

"Second thoughts about what?" Jordan asked blankly. Then she caught on. "What, staying with you guys? What's wrong with you? Of course I'm not having second thoughts." She gave him a friendly punch to the arm, and he laughed, but she could tell he'd been serious—well, so had she. She'd said it before, and she'd say it again: these were her boys, and there was nothing in this world nor the next that could keep her from them.

"I thought he was dumb as an ash tray when he told me," Dean admitted. "I thought for sure it'd send you running for the hills."

"Nah." Jordan smiled at him and looped her arm through his. "I wish I'd met you guys a little earlier, though."

"Really?" Dean stared at her—stared at the grease mark on her forehead. "_Why_?"

"It's just—" Jordan shrugged. "It's been you two, going it alone, for a long time. I kind of wish you had a little more back up now and again, is all."

"We had Bobby—"

"Not the kind of back up I meant, sweetheart." Jordan leaned her head on his shoulder and tucked herself a little more firmly against his side. "Not to mention you could have used a girl's advice at least a hundred times over."

"Oh?"

"Sam told me about Lisa."

"Oh." Dean didn't pull away, exactly, but he tensed up like he was readying himself for a blow. "Did he? And what did Sammy have to say?"

"He said you left behind a girl that was totally into you," said Jordan. "He said she was smoking hot and had an adorable kid."

"Ben," Dean said. "The kid's name is Ben."

"Yeah, I know." Jordan sat up a little and smiled at him. "Sam said you all really hit it off—he was obviously right. So what the hell are you still doing here?"

"Because life isn't that simple, okay?" Dean shook her off and got to his feet, face creased into a scowl, but Jordan was nothing if not tenacious, and followed him. She grabbed the edge of his jacket and held on.

"Life is simple," she told him. "_We_ make it complicated. So why aren't you bedding and wedding Lisa?"

Dean glared at her. "Not everyone likes this life as much as you do, Jordan. Some people are, you know, _normal_. There's no way I could be with Lisa and still hunt."

"You like your job that much?" asked Jordan. "Or do you not love her enough?"

Dean's eyes blazed. "If you weren't a girl, I'd hit you."

"Yeah? Because I'm right or because I'm wrong?"

"You," Dean said, pointing at her nose, "have been hanging out with Sam too much."

"I notice you haven't answered the question."

"Why should I have to?" Dean retorted, shouting now. Jordan stood her ground. Six months ago, a pissed off Dean would have necessitated a change of underwear, but if there was one thing she'd learned over the years, it was that Dean, at the end of the day, was a first-class teddy bear.

Sometimes. If he liked you enough.

"Hit me if it'll make you feel better," Jordan said through clenched teeth, "but I'm not going to leave this one alone. Maybe this is hard for you to understand, but you deserve to be happy."

"I don't _deserve_ anything," said Dean. "Much less her."

This time, when he walked away, Jordan didn't follow.

* * *

Jordan avoided mirrors nowadays. She saw things in them she didn't approve of—like her narrow curves replaced with muscles that had turned her frame angular, or hair that had split ends, or a spray of freckles across her nose because she'd run out of her sun-protecting moisturizer a month ago. Most of all she hated the look in her eyes. Her lips were always smiling and her skin was always glowing, but her eyes showed too much of her nightmares.

The spat she'd had with Dean—with all the best intentions, mind you—had only made it worse. She had circles under her eyes now, and no concealer to hide them. Her happiness was slipping away from her. The harder she tried to hold onto it, the faster it went.

"Want to talk about it?" Sam asked, and Jordan said, always, inevitably, "No."

What was there to talk about? That she had nightmares and daddy issues? Who _didn't_? So maybe she was afraid of being alone. Maybe she'd gotten so attached to the Winchester boys that they were the first and last thing on her mind, twenty-four seven, seven days a week. And maybe she dreamed, every godforsaken night, that they died.

There were people out there who had it worse. Starving children in Africa. Hobos. Dean.

So she took the GTO out for a spin. She didn't go far, just out into the woods, and parked it under the sky. She stretched herself out on the hood and closed her eyes. She could remember the night the nightmares started—the night her dad died, the night Jory became Jordan.

"So what are you doing here?" Jordan said aloud, eyes still squeezed shut. "Because they make you happy? You're still having nightmares, sweet pea. And pretending to be a tougher-than-thou hunter hasn't gotten rid of them either."

"You always talk to yourself?" a voice asked, and Jordan jerked upright. Sam was leaning against a nearby tree, and dimly, far back in the trees, she could see the headlights of the Impala. He must have let it coast in, because the Impala wasn't exactly a Prius—if the Impala was coming down the road, you knew about it.

"Um," said Jordan. Sam pushed away from the tree and she felt something like panic. Which was stupid. This was _Sam_. He didn't seem to notice, or if he did, he didn't care, because he kept coming, and didn't stop until his knees nearly touched the bumper.

"You ready to talk about those nightmares now?" he asked, hands in his pockets.

"No," said Jordan.

"Then I'll talk." He gave her a crooked smile. "Tell me if I get anything wrong."

Jordan just looked at him.

"You've been alone for a long time," he said. "No parents, no siblings, no family. All you have are friends, and those aren't permanent. There's no guarantee that you'll be friends forever. And it's getting to you. You need something to hold onto."

"You make me sound like such a pansy," Jordan snapped.

"No," said Sam. "Just scared."

"Thanks, Dr. Phil."

"Are you saying I'm wrong?"

_Déjà vu_, Jordan thought, and said, "Does it matter?"

"Yeah, it does." His eyes looked earnestly into hers. "You don't have to be alone, Jory."

"I don't have to be," Jordan agreed, sliding off the hood of the GTO. "But I am."


	9. Too Far Gone

The last chapter! Cripes, I never thought I'd get here. This fanfic is easily three times as big as I originally intended it to be. But, gosh darn it, there was so much to write! Jordan is pretty much an endless well of possibilities. I don't know if this is the last I'm going to do with her, but this is most certainly the end of this story. It's been a fabulous ride, kids! :)

* * *

It'd been a good idea at first. It wasn't a _safe_ idea, per se, but if she pulled it off, everything would be okay. She'd have proved to the boys that she was a real hunter, but mostly, she'd have proved to herself that she could go it alone. That she didn't _need_ anyone to lean on. So Jordan was going to on a hunt, by herself, and it was going to be a real whopper. Not pixies or Easter bunnies or little green men.

_Demons_.

She'd figured, hey. She'd killed vampires and a gremlin and those psycho suburban uber-pagans. Demons, all you had to do was get them in a corner, read them some gobble-de-gook, and you were done. Easy.

Of course it didn't go down that way. This was her life, after all. Meeting the boys had been the first lucky break she'd had, with the possible exception of a Louis Vuitton purse, still in its bag, left in the ladies' bathroom. (Lost and found? Forget it.) There was Audrey, who was her best friend, and the girl who'd helped Jordan drain her bank account more than once. Shopping was God, boys were toys, and all the things Jordan's father had taught her counted for precisely nothing.

No, when it really came down to it, it was the boys that mattered. And now she wasn't even going to live to see them again.

"I heard the Winchester two had become the Winchester three," the demon was saying, sitting cross-legged in front of her. He'd strung her up against a wall with barbed wire, to make sure she didn't move. "I didn't know it was a _girl_. It's not really their style, you know? But I never honestly expected to meet you. Nowadays, we avoid the Winchesters. Ever since they took up with Heaven, they've been a royal pain. Not that they weren't a royal pain before. It's just that now they're a royal pain with angelic assistance."

Jordan ignored him. She'd been ignoring him for hours now, letting her mind drift on as he talked. He hadn't tried to torture her yet, but she was sure it was only a matter of time—though the endless talking was beginning to seem like a torture all its own.

"Now, I've been thinking," said the demon. "Everyone has a weak spot. What's yours? If you run with the Winchesters, the usual gambits are probably worthless. The Winchester boot camp probably includes a unit on torture, courtesy of Dean Winchester, Hell's own master torturer." Jordan's eyes flitted to the demon's, just for a second. Sam had told her that Dean had gone to Hell once, and that he'd been made to do terrible things, but he hadn't exactly gone into detail. The demon grinned. "Oh, did you not know that? He was trained by our best demon. I mean, this guy was a first-class nut job even for _us_. He taught Dean well. I've seen some of his work—truly masterful stuff."

Jordan closed her eyes. _You're an idiot, Jordan Delaine. What did you think was going to happen? You'd point your gun at the demon and he'd stay nice and still while you read him the unholy riot act?_

Well, yeah.

He'd taken her down without even touching her. One minute she'd been standing in his doorway, determined to kick ass, and the next she'd been crammed up against the wall, choking Darth Vader style.

"Now you know why Mr. Dean knows so much about the art," the demon continued. "But you see my dilemma here—how do I torture a student of Dean Winchester, who was trained in Hell? That's a rather tall order. So I tell myself, _get inventive_! Go for the sweet spot. Want to know what your sweet spot is, doll?"

"Not really," said Jordan, eyes still closed.

The demon leaned forward until she could feel his breath on her face. It smelled like wintergreen and tacos. "What do you say to spending the rest of your pathetic life down here? I think I'll just leave you here. I think I'll board up the windows and doors and lock you up, and go on my merry way. Maybe leave some fancy symbols on the walls to keep your angel friends out. Hm? Sound fun? Eternity—or your little slice of it—_alone_."

"If it means you'll finally shut your cake hole," Jordan said, "then be my guest."

He fell silent, but only for a moment. Of course. As if she was that lucky. "You know, I almost believed you just then. Maybe my information was wrong. It's happened before. So _you_ tell _me_: what scares the hell out of you?"

"Rainbows and gum drops," said Jordan. "Asshole."

"Be that way," he said. "We'll just stick with Plan A, then. And maybe instead of leaving you to rot—or cut your wrists trying to wiggle free—I'll just stay upstairs and watch, hm?"

Jordan raised her eyebrows. "Does it count as solitary confinement if you're upstairs?"

Out of nowhere, he slapped her. The blow came down so hard and fast her jaw popped, and long after the split second it took for him to hit her, she could still feel his hand against her skin. "No one likes a bitch, sweetheart."

She watched as he vanished, holding her breath. It wasn't until she was positive that he was gone that she let out a sigh of relief. Finally. Some peace and _quiet_. Jordan twisted her head, moving slowly so that her skin wouldn't catch on the barbed wire across her throat, to peer at the wire holding her in place. She was bound from the elbow to the wrist, and even if Dean or Sam _had_ showed her how to Houdini a knot, she doubted it would apply to barbed wire.

"Shit," she said quietly, and sagged a little, only to bolt upright again a second later. Damn, but that barbed wire _hurt_.

* * *

You listen to the silence too long, and it starts to say things back to you. Things like "What's your malfunction, Delaine? Can't you do _anything_ alone?" or "Might as well give up the ghost on this one" or "Where are your sexy Winchesters now? You think Sammy's going to come save you? Are you _really_ that pathetic? This ain't a fairy tale, sweetheart."

That was right about where Jordan knew she'd officially lost it.

A person wasn't supposed to know that they were insane, but she figured it didn't count if you were expecting it to happen. She might have given the demon a moment's doubt before he skipped out, but he'd still hit it right on the money: Jordan Delaine was incapable of being alone. Terrified of it to the point of nightmares. Insanity sort of seemed inevitable.

So she wasn't the slightest bit surprised when her dad appeared. He didn't whoosh in, just—appeared. He looked at her and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Hell of a thing you're in now, Jory," he said.

"I know, dad."

"_Especially_ since it could have been avoided. If I've told you once, I've told you twice: never go in unprepared. You had your butt flapping in the wind on this one."

"I _know_, dad."

"If you knew I wouldn't be here talking to you, now would I?"

This was true. If she hadn't been dumb enough to take on a demon by her lonesome, she wouldn't be locked in a basement, so bat-shit insane that she was hallucinating her dead father. Jordan gave a gentle shrug, all she could manage, pinned as she was. "I just wanted to stop being afraid," she told him. "If I'm not afraid anymore, it doesn't matter if I'm alone or not."

"I've never heard of a boy turning _you_ down, Jory."

"This isn't about Sam."

His heavy dark eyebrows rose. "Oh, Sam, is it? The tall one? I'd have figured you for the one with the smart mouth."

"_Dad_."

"Well, I would." He paused. "So do you love him?"

Jordan's face twisted into an exasperated grimace. "_Christ_, dad. Who said I even liked him? All I'm saying is, I'm not stupid. I can't stay with the Winchesters forever. And I need to know that when that time comes I'll be all right on my own."

"So you decided to take on a _demon_? Jory…"

"I'm supposed to be alone, here," Jordan said, feeling stubborn. "I can't be tortured properly if I'm having conversations with my dead pops. Can't you go bother someone else for a while?"

Her dad came off the wall, oil-spattered boots making light _thunk-thunk_ noises on the cement floor. He licked his lips. "Jory, I want you to listen to me. I haven't got much time here, kid. When you were little you were the most independent little rascal there ever was. You never let anyone tell you what to do, and you'd just as soon spend the afternoons by yourself as with your friends. I hate that the death of your mother and I took that away from you. I just wanted to tell you that you're not alone, baby. You're not ever alone."

Tears slipped down her cheeks, down across the place where the demon had hit her, and it made her madder than hell that she couldn't reach up and wipe them away. "I haven't got a family anymore, dad. I don't have _anyone_."

"No?" Her father took a step closer. "Family's not just about blood, Jory."

"If you mean the boys," Jordan whispered, "it's not forever, dad, it can't be."

"Maybe it can, maybe it can't," he said, in the stubborn voice Jordan mimicked every day of her life. "I couldn't give a rip. What matters is that right now, at this second, they are one-hundred percent your family." He gave her a hard look. "And honey?"

"Yeah?"

"You know how to pick 'em. Those boys are good people."

He kissed her forehead—she felt nothing but the slightest breeze—and then walked over to the wall, where the demon had painted symbols to keep out Castiel. "I love you, Jory," he said, and put his fist through it. He evaporated, like a mirage blowing away, and where he'd put his fist, the paint had worn clear off.

"I love you too, dad," Jordan said. Above her, there was a scream, the sort of scream you heard in horror movies when some girl is being disemboweled, except that the slight roughness at the end suggested that it was a man, not a girl. The basement door exploded—literally; there was nothing left but splinters—and Castiel came through, face bent into a hell-raising scowl.

"Finally," Castiel said, quick-stepping it over to her. He touched his fingers to the barbed wire and it flew off, leaving a nasty track of holes in its wake where it'd pressed into her skin.

"Why, were you looking for me?" Jordan asked, and Castiel gave her a look, like she was five and had just said something truly moronic.

"I feared you were dead," he replied, and took her hand. "Try to take deep breaths. Dean says this is a terrible way to travel."

They vanished.

* * *

After what felt like an eternity of diabolically heavy pressure pressing at her from every direction—like being squeezed through a keyhole—Bobby's living room came into view, and Jordan promptly fell, her legs numb from hours of standing upright. At first she thought Castiel had caught her, but the smell was all wrong, and when she turned her head she saw the corner of what was unmistakably Sam's ear.

"Thank God," Sam was saying, to which the natural reply was, "Thank _Cas_."

He pulled away a little, looking down at her, and she saw, with no small amount of surprise, that his eyes were bright with tears. She grinned, a strange expression on a face that was white as a sheet. "Crybaby," she said.

"We thought you were _dead_," Sam said indignantly, and over his shoulder, Jordan could see Dean turning to look out the window, like maybe he was afraid that she'd see something in his eyes, too.

"Yeah?" she asked.

"Yeah!"

"So what're you going to do about it, big man?" For a second he only squinted at her—she could almost see the wheels turning—and even though it was clearly her idea, she still let out a little squeak of surprise when he kissed her.

"Good God," said Castiel, but Jordan was busy, and did not hear him.

Her dad was right, just like he was right about pretty much everything: the forever part didn't matter. Right at this moment, three of the sexiest men she'd ever encountered were standing in one room, brought together because of her, and one of them—the cutest, in her opinion—was giving her a kiss the likes of which have never been seen before or since. She had a family, and they were called Winchester.

That was good enough for her.


End file.
